// PC GAMER — GAMING
I tried to create the perfect zombie apocalypse in this intensely detailed outbreak simulator, and sorry slow zombie fans, fast zombies are just better
"It's the game I wanted to play but couldn't because it didn't exist, so I made it."
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday feature where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
In hindsight, calling my new town—in outbreak simulator DeadOS—Zombieville was a rubbish idea. Not only because it's a terrible name for a town, but also because Zombieville completely failed to live up to its name.
See, I'd cooked up a properly nasty pathogen for my nominally determined settlement, the kind that makes 28 Days Later's Rage virus look like a bad cold. It transmitted instantly, converted the victim almost as fast, and produced zombies that could move twice as quickly as the average human.
If this thing got out into the streets, humanity would be dead in days. At least, that's what I thought as patient zero Ruby Mancini picked up the virus at an inner-city intersection (cause unspecified, but let's say 'bat burrito'). After turning a gnarly shade of green, Ruby was primed to chow down on her fellow pedestrians. But she had barely taken a step before being run over by a car.
Ruby's premature un-death taught me an important lesson: it's surprisingly hard to get a good zombie apocalypse going. And it isn't the only thing I learned from DeadOS, a simulator dedicated to the part of zombie fiction that most games gloss over.
DeadOS is the creation of Benn Powell, an indie game developer who you might know for his Randomizer mods for the Resident Evil series. Indeed, it was Resident Evil, specifically Resident Evil 3, that formed the inspiration for DeadOS:
I really wanted to make a game that focussed on that specific part, the part that never makes it into a game.
"There's a cutscene right at the beginning where they show the helicopter flying over, all the people getting eaten and dying, and the police coming out and doing their bit," Powell says. "Then everybody's dead and the game starts. I really wanted to make a game that focussed on that specific part, the part that never makes it into a game but is always in a cutscene."