The Growth of the Zombie Myth

[Arkynomicon]

I am so sick of the old-hat infection story. It's like people don't want variety in their entertainment and somehow become mindless automatons that just look for their next zombie product to consume.

Although, this is probably more attributed to society at large not setting a standard for their entertainment because thinking is confused with labour.

 

[The Crazy Legs]

Although, now that I've applied some thought to it, zombies don't look like much of a threat. They look rather bland and uninteresting. They can't really hurt anyone as much as they should be able to (except for the runners), and they're all so predictable. We know how to kill them off with our normal guns.

... That being said, what if we were fighting Necromorphs instead (yeah, Dead Space)? Explosions don't really hurt them (so, fuck grenades and rockets), and our guns don't have the level of accuracy required to tear those limbs off. Not only that, but then there's the special 'morphs. The ones that regenerate lost limbs. Ugh... Hopefully someone on Team Science had been playing Dead Space and knows how to kill them, and starts arming the Earth's troops with rifles that don't fire bullets, they fire SAW BLADES. Or shotguns. Shotguns work, too.

Now THAT'S an apocalypse I can buy!

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

I thought "special zombies" came from the idea that not everyone dies from zombie infection, some mutate. And that's a mutant myth, almost as popular as zombie one.

 

[Something Amyss]

"Chinese whispers"? Is that the British version of Telephone (a game kids play where you whisper a phrase to someone, they whisper to the next person, etc. and change it slightly each time)?

Yahtzee got the origins of the zombie wrong, which to me puts a bit of a damper on an article that talks about the evolution of the zombie myth. It's also kind of ironic, when you consider he starts talking about the distortion of myths.

Exactly my thoughts as well - nothing about the origins of zombies in Voodoo lore. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie]

It's kind of like talking about the history of punk and starting it with Blink 182 and Good Charlotte.

"Chinese Whispers" is telephone, yeah.

 

[Xakk Zeliff]

You know what would bring around a return of standard zombie conventions? Something I have been lobbying for that has never been achieved, quite yet: A game starring the zombie outbreak. On a global level, from the macro to the micro. When your player has a few hundred or a bajillion zombies to control themselves, shuffling, grabbing, and biting will suit them just fine, just fine.
In fact one thing that's been neglected is the 'zombie time bomb', that ever-present infection carrying, lying jerkass who hangs out with the living, apt to turn any minute in the midst of his former friends.
Really you don't need to change the zombies themselves to make a zombie game more varied and challenging. The environment of encounters can make it so, like any game really, but where it's a little overboard to make you fight fire-spewing hell wolves in obscuring high grass, it suits a field of crawlers well.
Course, as I said, any game could take a lesson from this, and give us better environments to fight in, instead of path valley path valley ad nauseum.

 

[TheUnbeholden]

I mean, really. We all know how to kill them. Fill them with bullets, aim for the head, and if that doesn't work, get out a chainsaw and cut off their limbs. (Yeah, a Dead Space reference, get over it)

Actually its a Brain Dead reference (or Dead Alive if you're in the US)... which came out way before Dead Space you moron.

And no I will not get over it because its a great movie.

Portable Lawnmower in Dead Rising 2 was a reference to the film also.

 

[The Crazy Legs]

... No... I... I don't know what that is. Never seen that, never played either Dead Rising. So I'm sorry that I didn't know that cutting off limbs wasn't original. Or did you mean the chainsaw part? I can't tell because I DIDN'T WATCH DEAD ALIVE!!!

 

[head desk tricycle]

The seeds of "special" zombies exist in earlier zombie movies. Even in the earliest Romero zombie films, he'd often show that some zombies functioned sort of like bellwethers, and it was implied that this was generally a consequence of the personality that they retained.

 

[leviadragon99]

Yeah, I am a bit cynical about fast, pugilistic zombies and super-dooper mutant ones, it seems to miss the point.