Zombie Apocalypse / Video Games

Zombie Apocalypses in Video Games.

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• Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl has the Bonus Level "ZOMG ZOMBIES", where you're stuck in a city with endlessly respawning zombies coming at you from all directions.
• In AdventureQuest Worlds, Vordred creates this in the Doomwood Part 1 finale if the hero chooses to betray Artix and let Vordred become the Champion of Darkness.
  • Also, in Doomwood Part 2, Drakath grants Gravelyn's wish to bring her father back by sending her and everybody else to an alternate past created by him where he never intervened with King Alteon and Sepulchure's duel. There, this is what happens when Sepulchure kills Death.
• The early 80's Edutainment Game Agent USA is a G-rated Zombie Apocalypse, with people turning into walking balls of TV static and infecting others.
• Of course like with anything, AliceSoft has touched on this one. Sengoku Rance in the late game features a forbidden youkai named "Soul Binder" who spreads a truly horrifying curse — anything and anyone who touches Soul Binder will turn into an "Infected", a grey-skinned husk with eyes that have a Sickly Green Glow, the victims will rot while aimlessly walking around and their souls are not allowed to leave the body until they are either brutally maimed (Kill It with Fire is basicly the only solution) or the victims touched 5 others each, who then ALSO turn into "Infected". The curse ravaged JAPAN 8 years ago in the story and back then it already caused the most grief in the history of the country. Which is exactly why the Big Bad wants to utilize it.
• Alliance of Valiant Arms has the "Infection" game mode, where random players will become zombies and must then infect the remaining players who are attempting to kill them.
• ANNIE: Last Hope is set during and after a zombie outbreak, where you're caught in the initial outbreak's chaos and separated from your fiancée. Two months later, the zombie virus has taken over the entire city, you're taking refuge with survivors in the Arctic before deciding to return to the city for clues.
• Arizona Sunshine is set in the southwest of America, which is overrun with zombies.
• Arma and Arma II both featured popular zombie mods that turned an ultra-realistic tactical FPS into a zombie survival game. The use of massive maps and realistic effects and equipment makes them extremely immersive. One of the most most famous and succesful is DayZ.
• Battle for Wesnoth's Walking Corpses, and their level-up, the Soullesses. They follow the Russo rules, for the most part: any unit killed by a Walking Corpse or Soulless becomes a Walking Corpse or Soulless on the side of the Corpse that killed them, simulating The Virus.
• The Blackpine Outbreak has you traverse a small zombie-infested town near the Canadian border.
• Blood, a game created around horror movie tropes, had its fair share of zombies (the tougher variety's appearance taken directly from George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead). In the sequel, living dead were replaced by people taken over by supernatural wormlike parasitic beings.
• The blood plague in Bloodborne, which leaves those afflicted mindless beasts preying on the healthy.
• Bloody Zombies is set a year after a zombie virus turns most of London's population into the undead, with four survivors investigating the source of the outbreak while fighting assorted zombie enemies.
• Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned has you trying to clean up one of these with More Dakka. The Jakobs PA system has even been hacked to refer to it as such.
• Call of Duty first gave us Call of Duty: Zombies, which was the reason many played World at War. The game mode returned in Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which it gets so bad that zombies attack the Pentagon, four cult monster hunters have to be called in, and at the end, the Big Bad reveals that it's all an Evil Plan to cause an apocalypse. Returned in the sequel with Tranzit, wherein four people need to decide whether to simply try to kill waves of zombies that grow in power until they stop (they never do) or try to do the vague things one of two disembodied voices are telling them to do. Call of Duty: Black Ops II certainly fits this trope, as Marlton laments "I would not trade this gun for all the tea in China... if there even is a China anymore."
• Some versions of Carmageddon replace the pedestrians with zombies. According to the Nintendo 64 port, this is the result of a solar flare hitting the Earth and turning most of humanity into zombies.
• An infinite number of zombies usually appears early on in Castlevania games. Fortunately they're much easier to kill than the average movie zombie.
• Cataclysm involves surviving a zombie apocalypse in a randomly generated world. However, there are actually many other invasions and attacks by monsters other than zombies happening at the same time, so you'll have to survive attacks from Big Creepy-Crawlies, Eldritch Abominations, and Triffids on top of the zombies.
• Cepheus Protocol: The game's premise has you stopping one in-progress before it becomes a global crisis.
• In Charlie Murder, the rival band Gore Quaffer starts a zombie apocalypse to take the titular Charlie Murder out and serve as the standard Mook.
• In City of Heroes and City of Villains, zombies are counted among the servants of the Banished Pantheon and the minions of Dr. Vahzilok. Also, the Halloween events feature zombies that spawn from trick-or-treating, and the 2008 incarnation featured zombies crawling from the ground en masse. Finally, the Mastermind Necromancy primary set lets player villains summon their own zombie minions.
  • In City of Heroes, there's also Dark Astoria, a Zombie Apocalypse relegated to a single town. It was destined to happen though, considering that there's Romero Heights and Raimi Arcade.
• Counter-Strike had an influence on this, where the most favored zombie mode, Infection, has the opposing side as fast-running zombies, and the other as CTs/Ts. Whoever is hit by a zombie is turned into one, and so on. The second popular mode, called Zombie Riot, is a typical zombie apocalypse and is players versus computer-controlled zombies, with no infection.
  • According to creators, while playing with the AI for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, they discovered that playing an outnumbered team of bots with knives only served as a makeshift zombie apocalypse scenario. This led to the creation of Left 4 Dead.
• In Darkest Dungeon, this is one of the many problems afflicting the Estate. The Ruins region is overrun with the undead, who have been raised from the corpses of the soldiers and nobility of the families who lived in the incredibly wealthy manor. The undead are the result of a cabal of Necromancers, undead themselves, who were created when the Ancestor delved into necromancy himself and invited a group of "overseas experts" and learned from them. Once he gained all he needed, he then murdered his guests in their sleep and raised them from the dead with all of their abilities and intellect intact. This resulted in an endless cycle of the dead raising the dead, over and over.
• In The Darkside Detective, the season finale, "Don of the Dead", features the city's dead being reanimated as a side-effect of a sinister ritual.
• The curse of the Darksign in Dark Souls. Those born with it are marked as Undead and never permanently die, always coming back, losing a bit of their humanity each time. Eventually, they all lose their minds and become Hollows, highly aggressive, near-mindless beings that attack all others. This, plus the habit of throwing the Undead into the Undead Asylum, has destroyed countless nations.
• Xbox and PlayStation 2 game Dark Watch is sometimes subtitled "The Curse of the West", said curse being a Zombie Apocalypse unleashed on The Wild West by a vampire lord whom the protagonist, an outlaw gunslinger, accidentally set free when he thought he was robbing a gold train.
• Dead County is about a delivery man making his way home in a zombie-infested city.
• The MMO Dead Frontier takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse with the player as one of a handful of survivors who must constantly make supply runs into the city, which has been overrun by zombies of many shapes, sizes and speeds, to procure food, medical supplies, new weapons and ammunition. It's important to note that mostly everyone has a place in the new society, such as doctors, engineers and even chefs, and those who try to go it alone may find themselves as zombie food more often than they'd like.
• Dead Island is about a zombie apocalypse in a tropical island resort in the South Pacific.
• The Dead Linger wants to provide the ultimate zombie survival experience. In the finished game, it will be completely up to you, whether you want to wander through the almost endless, procedurally generated (and zombie-filled) world alone or with your friends (or strangers) in multiplayer. You'll be able to reinforce a bus and use it as a mobile base or barricade yourself in a prison, barn, military base or other building (or build your own makeshift home). But of course, you'll have to scavenge food and weapons and other things. And also...you are not immune to The Virus.
• Dead Rising is similar to Resident Evil below in that the USA^note they only place where there are zombies (the Zombrex Dead Rising Sun film is a Show Within a Show) is kind of tolerating the zombies. Apparently, there are zombies out in the countryside of middle and Midwestern America, but being slow and fragile, they are not that big a threat individually. The danger comes in densely populated areas; Willamette in the first game, Las Vegas in between games, and Fortune City in the second game. The rapid speed of the outbreak in Fortune City is explained by the fact that the city was hosting Terror is Reality, an American Gladiator-style reality TV show about killing zombies en masse, and someone simply destroyed the gate on the zombie pens, releasing the show's extensive stock into the city. Dead Rising 2 also reveals that there is now a standard procedure for an outbreak.
  • Dead Rising 3 reveals that the guy who kicked off the Zombie Apocalypse didn't want to endanger all humanity (just the USA). So while he infected most of his orphans with the zombification virus to start outbreaks across America, he also inoculated one (the protagonist) with the cure to act as a failsafe.
• Dead Space features the necromorphs, these zombies are not just reanimated humans but 'reshaped' necrotic tissue who don't go down until you blow of a limb or three. Head shots are useless against them.
• In Death Road to Canada, zombies are on the loose in America. No one knows how. No one knows why. No one cares. The only solution is to hightail it to Canada.
• Diablo III features an actual Zombie Apocalypse caused by the Skeleton King of New Tristram after a mysterious meteor crashed into Tristram's cathedral. Whereas in the previous games the zombies were mere mooks that you would meet and kill, this game features them much like a classic example, with them attacking villages and able to turn people they bite into zombies.
• Die2Nite is a game set in a world already devastated by one of these. All that is left are a few small towns and buildings in a vast endless wasteland. Unlike many other games of this genre the main goal isn't to survive or find rescue... it's to delay death as long as possible. Sooner or later, every town, every player, even the best, will die and have to start over in a new town.
• Spoofed in Disgaea 4 with the A-virus, which is slowly turning all of the Netherworld into mindless zombies — or rather, they're turning everyone into Axel, but the main characters see little difference.
• Any Dominions nation with the popkill and autospawn mechanics have elements of this, as the first means population decreases in areas under their influence while the second means armies spawn on their own without you having to recruit them (they are usually coupled for balance reasons). The closest in terms of lore are Middle Age Ermor and the Late Age nation of Lemuria, both undead hordes (one skeletal, the other spectral) with the popkill and autospawn mechanics. It took several desperation moves by surrounding nations to stop and destroy Ermor, including one that made deals with devils and another that raised undead armies of their own.
• Wolfenstein 3-D: There are re-animated corpses that act as enemies, these being created by Nazi Mad Science.
• Doom:
  • The zombies are undead foot soldiers (a few pistol shots can do one in permanently), still using the firearms they had been carrying in life (though Doom³ introduced more regular walking corpses, which were originally intended to keep getting up as long as their corpse was intact, as revealed in a leaked beta; this was dropped from the final version because the ragdoll physics added to their deaths made it impractical).
  • The Doom novelization has especially creepy scenes where zombies, still bearing an imprint of their former lives, will mindlessly shamble to the grocery store, pulling rotting food from the shelves, walking past the cash register, and so on.
• Quake:
  • The zombies are shambling long-dead corpses in the Russo mould (nothing short of dismembering them with explosives), though much more easily killed "grunts" more like the Doom zombies are found in the early levels of each episode (these may well have been still living, but possessed or otherwise mind-controlled).
  • Quake IV features partially Stroggified humans whom for all intents and purposes behave like zombies, this is Lampshaded by another soldier.
  • Quake's instruction manual explains that the Grunts have cybernetics wired into their brain that stimulate their pleasure centers whenever they kill someone.
• In Dwarf Fortress, zombie apocalypses are now completely possible, and are one of the deadliest threats a fortress can face if the ball gets rolling. You see, every creature killed in evil biomes will, if not quickly cremated, reanimate and join the undead horde. This can include even the most minute body parts — even mussel shells. Once the zombies start racking up a few kills, they quickly becoming a massive ball of flesh and bones that reanimates itself faster than it can be killed. If you're really unlucky, you might instead have fog banks that turn normal creatures into horrific life-hating ghouls. Sometimes it's dust that rubs off onto things fighting with them, by which point there's nothing more to do. Becoming one of those horrific life-hating ghouls by evil fog doesn't necessarily end an Adventuring career, and by acquiring the secrets of Necromancy, the player can become The Virus, commanding an ever-expanding horde of animated dead over the world.
• In Dead Ahead Zombie Warfare, the world is set in a zombie apocalypse created by the influence of mysterious blue energy. The player controls a group of survivors moving through the abandoned cities in a bus.
• In Elite Beat Agents, one of the missions involves a very lighthearted parody of these in which the zombies are constantly giggling, spread the infection by kissing, and have allergies that cause them to return to being normal people after eating peanuts. Being a Rhythm Game, it's set to a cover of "Survivor" by Destiny's Child. It's just as wacky as it sounds.
• Everybody Edits has the zombie potion, which turns the player into a zombie for a minute and spreads the effect to all other players touched. Being a zombie comes with the disadvantage of lower speed, jump height, and having to respawn after the effects end.
• Fever Cabin has the Player Character trying to survive five nights against undead hordes that get stronger as time progresses.
• Fire Emblem Engage's Fell Xenologue involves the main character Alear being transported to a Mirror Universe where all of the kingdoms on the continent of Elyos are at war with each other, all the while Corrupted starts to overrun the world. As it turns out, everyone in this alternate Elyos (excluding the playable characters) is already dead, and have been resurrected as Corrupted, meaning the world is nothing more than a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the zombie apocalypse had already taken place.
• In a similar fashion, countless zombies (and other things) plague our hero in Ghosts 'n Goblins.
• Grey: An Alien Dream: One of the Dream Lands Grey is stuck in is a city in ruins and flames that's choking in zombies.
• The Half-Life series has its ubiquitous, iconic Headcrabs and the zombies they create when they attach themselves to a suitable host and commandeer its nervous system. Although incapable of infecting others directly, they otherwise behave identically to Romero zombies (Zombie Gait, mindless, dangerous in numbers, prone to Infernal Retaliation et cetera). In the original game they were weak and somewhat annoying enemies, rarely present in more than small groups. In Half-Life 2 and its Episodes however they cause two instances of this trope:
  • The Combine commonly use Headcrabs as a biological weapon, storing them in artillery shells which are fired on entrenched locations, the shell both causing structural damage and killing any nearby humans due to its impact or the Headcrabs it releases. When the Combine discovered Ravenholm, a small mining town used to shelter a large number of people who had fled from Combine control, it was subjected to massive bombardment by these weapons, and by the time Gordon arrives the only things he finds are corpses, hordes of Headcrab Zombies, and one shotgun-wielding Badass Preacher.
  • In Episode One the entirety of City 17 experiences this, the liberal use of Headcrab Shells during The Battle of City 17 and the destruction of the Citadel's Dark Fusion Reactor crippling Combine control of the region resulting in the city's underground infested with Headcrabs and zombies and the city itself under almost constant attack. With the complete detonation of the Citadel they are the only living things remaining in City 17 and even they are fleeing by Episode Two, creating a constant stream of zombies into the surrounding regions that attack humans and Combine alike. That Gordon Freeman, what a great hero.
• In Halo, the Flood, who seem to have originated from a galaxy outside of the Milky Way, are very capable of causing an apocalypse. The infection forms and airborne spores first turn any sentient lifeforms they come across into zombies. Eventually, the infected beings begin to deteriorate and bloat, releasing more infection forms, which go to infect other people and so on and so forth, until they gain enough biomass to form a variety of "Pure" Flood forms, including the Gravemind, a hyper-intelligent hive-mind containing the memories and knowledge of every single being in history to have been assimilated by the Flood. This intelligence manifests itself in the ability of the Flood to utilize complex technology, strategize, and fully communicate with non-infected beings (the last known Gravemind even had a tendency to speak in trochaic heptameter). They were so powerful that the only way the highly-advanced Forerunners managed to defeat them was activating the seven Halo Arrays in order to kill all sentient life in the galaxy and starve the Flood of their necessary nutrition. Even afterwards, they had a bad tendency of overrunning their holding facilities whenever outside interlopers stumbled upon them; they completely consumed the Halo in the first game, and end up doing the same to the Threshold research facilities, Delta Halo, and the Covenant capital city of High Charity in Halo 2. They got to Earth in Halo 3, and were only stopped by the Elite fleet glassing a huge chunk of Africa. They also nearly completely overran the massive extra-galactic Forerunner instillation known as the Ark before the current Gravemind and presumably all other Flood from the Milky Way more advanced than an infection form were finally destroyed.
  • The Forerunner Saga reveals that the Flood are in fact the malevolent remnants of a species known only as the Precursors, who were even more advanced than the Forerunners. There is also no true cure for it; the Flood can simply choose whether it wants to infect someone or not. The only organic sentient beings that seem truly immune to direct infection are those lacking a central nervous system, though they can still be killed and converted into Flood biomass.
  • Halo 3 introduced a multiplayer mode where someone is "infected" and spreads it by killing people with the energy sword, and they come back to do the same. Eventually, you have a few regular people left heading for the high ground to snipe as much as they can before being overwhelmed. It is very unlikely (though possible with a few skilled players working together) for survivors to last until the end of the round. Infection variants on modified maps make up the Living Dead weekend event, which plays on random weekends as well as on Halloween.
  • Well, the third game was when it was made official and programmed in as a gametype by Bungie. It was played unofficially in custom team slayer games as early as Halo 2, by designating one team a zombie team, and the other a human team. This put everybody on the honor system though, since you had to manually change teams yourself. This, combined with the fact that some hosts went by Russo rules where you have to get killed by a zombie and only by a zombie to turn, while other hosts went by Romero rules where all deaths should make a convert, predictably lead to chaos and frustration when dealing with inexperienced, stubborn, or otherwise plain stupid players.
• While the text/ASCII-based Hell MOO doesn't feature an actual zombie apocalypse (they go for the standard nuclear warfare), there is a zombie virus and some locations, especially the basement of the Bradbury hotel in Slagtown, are filled with them. Since all NPCs can be killed (with varying degrees of difficulty) and anyone who dies of zombie rot rises as a zombie if their corpse isn't butchered, one or two tough NPCs getting infected can easily result in a zombie plague hitting Slagtown; usually the Freedom City Police is skilled and tough enough to keep the spread outside their borders, but it can make wandering into Slagtown or Gangland suicide for a newbie.
• Zombies are a part of the Necromancer's army throughout most of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. They also happen to be slow and weak units (compared to most units of the same tier). You can't even make that many of them. It is however possible to make a looot of skeletons in most of the games. In an average sized map it's not too hard to build an army with over a thousand skeletons, thus creating a skeleton apocalypse.
  • The Ghost Planet scenario in Heroes of Migh and Magic II Gold (originally a fan map, but included in the compilation release) had as its central story theme a ghost apocalypse — ghosts in Heroes II had the "one kills you, you become one" ability, the implications of which Ghost Planet ran with.
• The House of the Dead series. In the first game, it's isolated to a mansion and the associated research facility. In the second game, it's taken over Venice. In the third game, it's finally consumed the entire world. The fourth game takes place before the third and it's starting to spread.
  • Averted in The House of the Dead: OVERKILL: the mutants were exposed to a Psycho Serum and it's not contagious otherwise.
• Infected features a massive zombie apocalypse in New York City, played Smash TV style. The player is Officer Stevens, whose blood is not only immune to The Virus, but actively destroys zombies, who are nigh-invulnerable to everything (it's implied they destroyed a tank battalion, and were able to wield weapons) by causing infected blood to explode. This results in the guys in charge of the quarantine to strap a blood gun to one arm of Stevens, give him/her weapons, and run around NYC, splattering zombies. For the record, the game is hilarious and fun, but short.
• In the Web Game series Infectonator!, the main goal of the game is to inflict this on cities worldwide. You win once you completely destroy all the cities with your zombie plague.
• Kingdom of Loathing had the Gray Plague, which, as players found out through Time Travel to Seaside Town, 28 Days Later, killed the infected population and brought them back as zombies.
  • The special challenge path "Zombie Master" has you playing through a zombie apocalypse. Not as a survivor, but as a zombie yourself.
• King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella is one of the earliest examples of the trope, which is even more disturbing because it takes place in a fairy tale country of princesses, fairies and magical talking creatures. It is, frankly, terrifying. Fortunately for most young players at the time of its release, they came late in the game. Due to the general unforgiving hardness of a Roberta Williams title, it was uncommon for any player to get that far without help.
• One of the worlds Larry visits in Landflix Odyssey is an Expy of The Walking Dead (2010).
• Last Rites is set after a zombie apocalypse, and you're part of a commando team tasked with battling the undead.
• A game called The Last Guy features the zombie hero(?) rounding up the various survivors of a zombie apocalypse. From the looks of it, the zombies have devolved (or evolved) into large, dangerous, non-human things, however.
• The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II take place in a world where the Cordyceps fungus (nicknamed the "zombie ant fungus") has evolved into a strain that can infest human brains, causing most infected to become violent to the point of insanity. With no way to stop spreading spores, 90% of humanity ends up wiped out over the course of a few years, with only small pockets left in military controlled cities or colonies of independent survivors.
• Left 4 Dead is fairly nonchalant with its predicament. Zoey can utter the following line; "I can't get over how fast they all are. It's not even fair! I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? They're not allowed to be so fast."
  • The virus in Left 4 Dead also seems to be a fairly flexible type. While it turns most people into common cannon fodder zombies, what little backstory exists suggests that it can target certain aspects of infectees to create the Special Infected. Infection is transferred via bite, and can take approximately an hour to set in depending on circumstances. Certain people seem to be 'blessed' with utter immunity (or were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time; ie, offshore or in the air and nowhere near the spreading infection), making the four heroes not the sole survivors.
    • Thanks to the events of Left 4 Dead 2 and the comic of events taking place after the first game, it's been discovered anyone who can resist being changed into a zombie are actually carriers; people who carry the virus and can't mutate, but can still spread it to others, effectively making anyone who is an immune survivor spread the virus forever. The military sees these survivors as almost an enemy to humanity and are rounding them up for quarantine so they can try to find a cure, or kill them if they can't find any.
  • There is also a subversion to the rule that the zombies don't fight each other, but it's rare to happen when involving common Infected, and they still prioritize the players/non-infected individuals.
  • Two things throw into doubt whether this is a true apocalypse — the military's still in reasonable shape, having the capacity to launch rescue missions (the final campaigns of both games) and bombing runs (through most of "The Parish" in 2), and it's not stated what's going on in the rest of the world.
    • The military base portrayed in the comic seems to show the severity quite heavily. The base appears severely understaffed, with only a handful of soldiers where there should be hundreds. The base is also extremely insecure, with one soldier getting infected and nearly killing some guards, and a Witch somehow wandering right on in. To make matters worse, it's dangerously low on supplies, and one of the officers is leading a mutiny against the base's commander. The base also appears completely isolated from the rest of the military (if it's still even around). The base is ultimately destroyed by a massive zombie mob attack, and all known personnel are KIA. However, due to the infection's inability to spread over water, the Navy in L4D2 seems to be operating at full capacity.
    • Multiple maps show that almost all the evac centers in the US have been overrun or aren't evacuating anymore. In Crash Course, the New Orleans, Midwest, and Allegheny Forest outposts are still up and running. In Dead Center, only New Orleans and the Midwest are left. The entire United States has been overrun in 2-3 weeks.
    • Of course, by the time you reach New Orleans in The Parish campaign, it seems to be largely overrun and abandoned, too. Bill says "As far as we know, zombies can't swim", so it's possible that islands are still safe, as long as air travel didn't bring the infection to them.
• Parodied in LEGO Indiana Jones 2, when you reenter the level in which you escape the nuclear bomb, you find the town to be decimated and smoldering. You then build a device that brings the gray skinned dumbies to life! They can't do anything but irritate you but still...
• Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ. A grown-up Little Red Riding Hood vs. zombified versions of classic Fairy Tale characters.
• Lollipop Chainsaw is a Zombie Apocalypse in a school setting. Well, it starts off in a school, anyway.
• MadWorld has the Hunter's Castle, which had its entire foundation shipped from the quaint country of Zombikistan, but it also came with its chief export: ZOMBIES! They're even tougher than the normal version, being able to regenerate until someone decapitates them.
• Mass Effect has Husks, undead creatures who were impaled on spikes by the geth, though they usually serve as flunkies for other enemies. However, in Mass Effect 2, one level on a dead Reaper ship has nothing but Husks onboard, as well as their suicidal cousins Abominations, and Scions which are two husks smushed together in a single, twisted creature. On harder difficulty levels, where the formerly Goddamned Bats Husks have armour, the whole level has a very Survival Horror feel to it.
  • In Mass Effect 3 the Husks of many different species are the primary ground forces of the Reaper invasion, and you have to fight entire hordes of them at a time.
• MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies is set in one. It was originally just going to be the theme of the movie Blanc and Neptune were filming, but then a real one broke out.
• Metroid Fusion has a not-quite Zombie Apocalypse in the form of the X-Parasite. Once infected, the victim dies and is consumed, and the X mimics its form and abilities perfectly, eventually asexually dividing into more copies. If killed, it infects the killer or simply regenerates the body. They can even infect corpses to mimic them. One parasite can take over an entire Space Station in seconds. They are truly one of the most dangerous forms of The Virus in existence, beating out even the Flood in apocalypse potential. Easily.
  • Metroid Dread shows just how dangerous the X really are. For years they were quarantined in a single small section of planet ZDR, only to be released by Raven Beak partway through the story. From that point on, every single non robotic enemy in the entire planet has been infected. When Samus sees that they've been released, she doesn't even both trying to stop them because she knows that it's already too late.
• Minecraft Classic has a couple of mods that involve zombie hordes. "Zombie Survival" is a game mode where one of the players starts out as a zombie, and infects other players by touching them — the zombies' goal is to infect all players before the time limit runs out. (Zombies are represented as humans with an upside-down head, jammed into their body.)
  • Some custom servers allow the placing of NPC "zombies", which are represented as a green block atop a grey one, and move around chasing after players. Anyone they touch "has his brains eaten" and respawns on his spawn spot. However, they can be killed by destroying their "head block".
• There's something like this in the Mount & Blade mod Solid & Shade, though it isn't an infection. Essentially, the main character is a necromancer and just animates the bodies himself. Though it feels a lot like an infection or apocalypse, since a good way to get corpses is killing them with your zombie army and then reanimating them. It is not uncommon to lose your entire army in a fight, and then get them back with the corpses of your foes. The zombies are semi-intelligent, as they can use weapons, but not sentient. They can be killed by anything that can kill a human, but are much more difficult to kill. They don't appear to require food, although not having food will lower the morale of the party overall (most likely because you still need it) and, due to game mechanics, zombies will abandon you if they have a low morale.
  • In a bit of irony, the player starts with a corpse in his inventory to start necromancing faster. According to the backstory, this body belongs to the necromancer he killed to get the book of necromancy in the first place.
    • There's another mod called Chronicles of Talera that features a faction called the Blighted Plague. It's basically a faction of egalitarian Necromancers that brought back the corpses of the dead to overthrow the aristocracy. At first they were good guys, but after discovering tools to capture the souls of their enemies they began a civil war that really doesn't play any role whatsoever in the actual game.
• NationStates had this for 2013 April Fool's Day, complete with nations offering the cure, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and everything in between as a solution.
• This situation can be triggered in Nexus Clash by characters who follow Hashaa, Elder Power of Death. Every kill the cultists make rises as a zombie, and zombies raised by more powerful cultists raise other zombies, etc. Fortunately the infection burns out after a few generations, but it only takes a few ambitious players to keep the world infested with the undead more or less permanently. Previous versions of the mechanic didn't have any such limitations, leading to a perpetual self-sustaining Zombie Apocalypse via Gameplay Derailment.
• Not Dying T Oday is set in the aftermath of one such apocalypse, and you spend the whole game collecting weapons and power-ups to battle the undead.
• In Odin Sphere, Gwendolyn slew Odette, Queen of the Dead, resulting in King Gallon replacing her as the ruler of the Netherworld. He then proceed to lead the undead army to lay waste throughout the land during Armageddon, as prophesied.
• The flash game Organ Trail is an Affectionate Parody of The Oregon Trail where the pioneer journey west in a covered wagon has been swapped out by a station wagon fleeing the undead horde from Washington DC (which has been nuked by the government in an attempt to quell the infection) for safe haven in The Other Rainforest. Along the way, your party will be scrounging food and shooting the horde and you're lucky if you aren't showing up in Oregon with at least three of your five party members already infected.
• The game Overlord I features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead. In a twist keeping with its tone and sense of humor, it's caused by the proximity of a slutty, disease-ridden Succubus Queen; apparently, what's a harmless STD to a demoness is a virulent Zombie Apocalypse-inducing epidemic for humans.
• One of many possible creations in the Pandemic series, you can create shambling, insane, rotting (though technically still alive) infected who spread across the planet.
• The Necroa Virus in Plague Inc. qualifies, though it is possible to win with this virus without actually creating zombies (though it is Nintendo Hard even in the lowest difficulty). There's even an achievement for doing so, and the symptoms you do get(cannibalism, psychosis, delirium, etc.) give you Technically Living Zombies anyway.
• Plants vs. Zombies, you have to fight off a zombie uprising in your own backyard using nothing but aggressive plants.
• Possession, which, in addition to being able to lead a variety of zombies (slow, fast, intelligent, mutated, you name it) has the main character as a sentient zombie unleashing chaos on a corporate-controlled city.
• Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend features Mad Cow Tourette's zombies (apparently Tourette's syndrome sufferers who ate mad cow-infected meat). They normally shamble slowly, but can sometimes be seen stumbling forwards quickly (catching the player off-guard); they throw chunks of their own flesh to attack; their heads must be completely destroyed to kill them (merely cutting them off will do no good); and (for no other reason than the fact that the world of Postal 2 is already messed up as it is) you can resurrect dead zombies by pissing on them.
• Project Zomboid has Knox County being overrun by zombies with you in the middle of it. Developers state in later versions of the game, later (provided you survived that long) the zombies spread worldwide, with repercussions ingame such as no electricity for ovens or refrigerators. It uses straight-up Max Brooks rules: no fast infected, no special zombies, no zombified animals, and a single bite will always infect, no exceptions.
• The Propagation series is set after one of these, and both games respectively have your character trying to survive zombie swarms in a Sinister Subway and a Hell Hotel.
• The Virus in [PROTOTYPE] is something like this, only about ten to fifty times worse. For one, unlike most Zombie Apocalypses, it spreads like a highly contagious disease, rather than just happening to already dead people or like something more akin to rabies. Then you get to things like the Hunters and Hydras.
• The Putrefaction duology sees you fighting the undead after one such apocalypse, seemingly with viral origins, and you're tasked with finding out it's source. In the second game, you do: Stupid Jetpack Hitler is involved!
• Ratropolis is an unique case since it is set in a World of Funny Animals and the protagonists are cute antropomorphic rats. Fueled by greed, an experiment has Gone Horribly Wrong and resulted in creation of The Virus which brought ruin to the rat civilization. Now, in a world After the End, scattered groups of rats seek to settle down and rebuild the titular Ratropolis, despite constant attacks from infected mutants and predatory weasels.
• This seemed to be the original concept behind Raving Rabbids, but they decided to go with party games.
• Rebuild involves a group of survivors building fortifications around a few city blocks and holding off vast zombie hordes. Your goal in the game is to recapture a number of blocks, look for survivors and convince them to join you, produce food and shelter for everyone, keep everyone happy, research technology to help defend against the zombies and cure infections, scavenge for supplies (food, weapons, dogs, binoculars, crowbars, etc.). Once you manage to secure the town, you are given the option of starting over in a new location with 5 people. The third game adds other factions on different maps doing the same. They have different personalities and requirements. You can either make them like you enough to become allies or wage war on them. There are a total of 11 such factions (not counting the nomadic Gustav the Trader), which include the Granville Riffs (gang of karate dudes with mirrored shades inspired by Blaxploitation movies), the Last Judgment Gang (think church plus Hells Angels), Church of the Chosen Ones (a zombie-worshiping cult), the Pig Farmers (whose specialty is long pork), the Government (the remains of the US Government), the Dahlias (former suburban wives seeking to establish a Lady Land), and the Rotten (intelligent zombies, who mostly live in subways and sewers).
• The Reckoning is set in the aftermath of one. Details are unclear, but it seems to have been caused by a plague. According to a loading screen, it happened between 2014 and 2019, affected the whole world, and in 2019 the number of survivors in the whole world is 100,000 persons. In the proper game, infected are mostly here to provide early opposition to a low level player character, since most of the action is about the war between the human factions.
• Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC has this as the main premise — but like the rest of the game, it's set in the Old West. Yes, it's just as awesome as it sounds.
• Resident Evil is generally an aversion of this trope. Though the games center on zombies, they're often times small localized outbreaks of The Virus, e.g. a remote mansion or an island. Only Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis deal with anything close to a zombie apocalypse, with the virus ravaging an entire city; in the end, the military manages to put an end to it, but only by nuking the entire city.
  • 4 and 5 are something of a variant. There is a localized "outbreak" of sorts, but it's of living humans under the control of a Puppeteer Parasite, and said humans are organized and (more or less) retain their human intelligence. The outbreaks are also very controlled and deliberate on the part of the villains, and in fact, the parasite from 4 required the victim be injected with an egg.
  • Resident Evil 6 kicks it up a notch with zombies ravaging two fictional cities. This is also the first game where the zombie apocalypse is actually the intentional end-game of the Big Bad, as opposed to it being accidental outbreaks or part of their bid to Take Over the World.
• Sailor Zombie: This particular zombie apocalypse seemed to involve infecting six out of seven members of the J-Pop group AKB48.
• Averted in Saints Row: The Third when a small section of Steelport is infested with what appear to be zombies. It remains that way for the rest of the game however, so one could argue that the Saints are preventing the Zombie Apocalypse.
• The Secret World gives the player two varieties.
  • The first area you visit and explore, Solomon Island, is a small island community off the coast of Maine that has been overrun by zombies. It turns out that they were created by sea monsters called the Draug, serving as part of their life cycle. They sent an Ominous Fog to blanket the island and cause nearly all of its inhabitants (save for those who were asleep, trapped, or wearing gas masks/respirators) to walk out into the sea and later return to shore as zombies, followed by the Draug themselves, who implant the zombies with eggs in order to turn them into more Draug.
  • There's also the Filth, which is a zombie apocalypse on a cosmic scale, turning its victims into gibbering loons with black tentacles growing from every orifice who are sentient enough to use weapons and take proactive measures to spread it — and to be fully aware of their horrifying transformation. The stuff also oozes over the landscape, corrupting not just humans, but also plants, animals, and the earth itself. Lore entries and conversations reveal that Filth infection can spread by footprints, or by merely reading arcane graffiti left by a Filth infectee. The fog that overwhelmed Solomon Island was an airborne strain of the Filth, meaning that the zombies you fight there are actually reanimated Filth infectees — and as the Orochi Group's research team finds out, even those townsfolk who are still alive are in the early stages of infection and doomed to turn into monsters. It's behind many of the high-level beasties you face throughout the game, and when you arrive in Tokyo, you get to witness first-hand what a full-blown Filth Apocalypse looks like.
• SimCity 4:
  • Shows up as a joke. If you build a cemetery, zombies and ghosts will walk around your city. It's harmless.
  • One of Dr. Vu's mission has you take a crop duster to spray zombie dust on a cemetery. It's once again harmless but you lose some Mayor's Rating.
• The game The Sims 2 has zombies (introduced in one of the expansions). A mod on one of the most popular modding sites, MATY, changes their behavior so that they will fight and infect other characters in the game. The mod, aptly enough, is called Zombie Apocalypse. It should be noted that the zombies without the mod do not do this, and control essentially the exact same as a normal sim, the only except being that they won't die of old age. (Though they do think about brains a lot...)
• The final level of The Simpsons Hit & Run is populated by zombies that can be run over, due to Kang and Kodos infecting Springfield with BUZZ Cola for kicks and television ratings.
• Siren 1 — these are particularly notable, as they retain some of their intelligence and memories of their former life, and although they become murderous and gradually lose the ability to speak language intelligible to humans, they try to re-enact their living life if not over-ruled by the Hive Mind; as the game was first released in Japan in 2003, and EU and US in '04, this actually predates the use of this concept in Land of the Dead, although not the precursors to it seen in Day of the Dead.
• Space Pirates and Zombies, of course. You are Space Pirates! There are Zombies! What more is there to say? Well, actually, there is quite a lot to say, as the Space Pirates have got to wonder why there are no sentient alien species to speak of... then they open the Titan Gates, which they'd known about for quite a time, and all hell breaks loose because of them. True, they are Space Pirates, the terrors of the Seven Sectors, but that's no reason for them to doom all of Humanity to a zombie fate, like all the other sentient species before them. Yes, the Zombies were waiting in the center of the Galaxy for the next species, and it it weren't for the Space Pirates' efforts, they probably would have assimilated all of Humanity. What a way to go.
• Space Quest V: The Next Mutation has the mutant Pukoids fulfilling this trope. A corrupt starship captain was transporting and dumping tetragenic toxic waste on remote colony worlds, which ended up wiping out several worlds, most of his crew, and eventually kills him (with a little help from Almighty Janitor Roger Wilco).
• The FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. — Shadow of Chernobyl has zombies in one part of the game, who are actually stalkers who have been mind raped by psychic emissions in certain parts of the zone.
  • One notable difference from conventional zombies is that the brain-burned humans often carry the firearms there were wielding in life. Zombies with machineguns, anyone?
• In StarCraft 2, this happens to a group of refugees due to a zerg bioweapon. Raynor's raiders burn out the infested and help the refugees settle in on another planet — where it promptly happens again.
• Several examples in Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Tatooine Republic world quest has a renegade Czerka officer using a Rakata artifact to make armies of "cyber-necrotic" fighters. and then there's the Taris rakghoul plague, which started via a Sith artifact, managed to get off Taris, and then Dr. Lorrik got a hold of it and thought it was a great way to conquer the galaxy and the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement...
• The first State of Decay begins just *after* the apocolypse happens (you begin the game as a camper who's unaware of what's going on). The second game happens a few years later.
• StreetPass Mii Plaza has "Battleground Z" (aka "StreetPass Zombies") as one of its DLC games. It is a Lighter and Softer version of this trope but nonetheless a much darker game than all the others. You have to help Dr. Scarlet to evacuate all the survivors from Hobbiville (who help by giving you weapons based on their favorite hobbies) and find key elements to make a cure.
• As the title character of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, you get to play a zombie, bringing terror to the Zeerust utopia of Punchbowl.
• The flash game Super Energy Apocalypse: Recycled features a zombie apocalypse where zombies grow stronger the more pollution there is.
• Two prominent freeware games from Ska Software, Survival Crisis Z and Zombie Smashers.
• System Shock 2 had zombies as the first stage of infection by alien parasitic worms, including shambling, strange speech patterns, no vital signs, etc. Oh yeah, and they're still conscious, aware of what they're doing against their will, and apologise while they attack you and beg you to kill them. Later stages were considerably more monstrous, and quite un-zombie like.
  • The original System Shock had early mutants enemies that acted like normal zombies.
• Tangerine Tycoon allows you to unleash an apocalypse upon the world with the mutant tangerine upgrade. Having at least one of these will cause the sky and grass to turn red, and the human population to decrease, while the mutant tangerine multiplies at an increasingly fast rate. It is possible to fully exterminate the human species with enough time.
• They Are Billions is a Real-Time Strategy game taking place in the 22nd century were the nations have collapsed because of a zombie apocalypse and the survivors have reverted back to a 19th century tech base with a heavy dose of Steampunk. You are in charge of reclaiming land from the zombies and establishing new Human colonies.
• They Hunger, set in a small town and acres of farmland and ruins, appears to use modified Russo rules — the zombies are tough, but they're still killable and don't drop from headshots, BUT they die if they're shot anywhere for long enough. It also includes semi-infected zombies who are smart enough to still use guns, and two of them are bosses.
• In Time Crisis 5, Robert Baxter must have learned something from Caleb Goldman and Albert Wesker. With the drug he had stolen three years prior to the events of the game, he planned on launching a missile loaded with the drug to plunge the entire world into a zombie apocalypse, with the state of New York as his first terrorist attack. The enemies you fight in Stage 5 are also in a zombie-like state.
• In TRON: Evolution and TRON 2.0, virus-infected computers are subject to this, as the corrupted Programs have their circuits turned from normal colors to a Sickly Green Glow, their directives and functions overwritten to the single-minded pursuit of healthy Programs to destroy or corrupt. And in both cases the plague master / Subject Zero was merely an Unwitting Pawn to the truly diabolical Big Bad.
• Twin Caliber have a cult reviving the undead, resulting in a zombie outbreak that wipes out a small town. You play as one of two protagonists, respectively the town's sheriff and a convict on death row, forced to work together as they shoot their way out.
• Undying: The game is set in a world where a zombie outbreak's been going on for four months, and humanity is huddling in subway station made into extraction zones. The Player Character is a mother who was bitten by a zombie, and before she turns, needs to make sure her son is safe, and able to take care of himself after she fully turns.
• Urban Dead. Unlike other examples, the zombies in this game are intelligent since they are controlled by players. While they do have a limited vocabulary, zombie players have come up with creative ways of in-game communication. And that's not even counting the Metagame on the forums. It also emulates the Romero model of zombies getting smarter. As they learn more skills, zombies can open doors, move faster, attack better, talk (sort of), track you down, and make a lot of noise to draw attention when they find a safehouse full of survivors. If one counts the RP, they're also highly mutated, undying, and God help us if they break from the quarantine.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • There's a mission called "You Only Die Once a Night" where the Hollywood graveyard caretaker Romero(!) asks you to keep hordes of mindless zombies from breaking out of the cemetery. Infuriatingly enough, Romero has only given you the job of watching the graveyard so he can go out and buy porn! Some people neglect any duty they're given, it seems, which is why you're given the option of finding a prostitute for Romero instead of staying behind to cause a zombie apocalypse. Or, if female and with sufficient looks and poise, seducing him instead. The title card hilariously reads "Romero gets some lovin'." Romero specifically states getting bitten doesn't cause zombies, but it sure does hurt like hell.
  • There's also an earlier mission where you have to track down and kill the members of a cult of vampires that deliberately infects their meals with a horrible virus. You have to fight your way through a horde of zombies before you can take the last one on. The real threat in that quest isn't the cult or the zombies though. It's the CDC, who have the situation firmly in hand and are dangerously close to figuring out that zombies and vampires are the reason for the strange epidemic.
• The setting of The Walking Dead (Telltale), being set in the same universe as the The Walking Dead, but following a different set of characters. In the first season you play as Lee, as he tries to keep himself and a little girl, Clementine, alive.
• The grunt troops of the Scourge in Warcraft III and World of Warcraft are all zombies, reanimated by the Lich King or his necromancers. In Warcraft III, most of them are infected by contaminated food supplies rather than being killed by other zombies, although the Lich King is known to raise troops that have died in battle against the undead. Those who are freed from the Lich King's control before they decay too much will regain their sentience, but obviously remain as rotting corpses. In month leading up to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, suspicious crates and infected roaches found their way into various World of Warcraft cities, giving characters that came into contact with them the scourge toxin, turning them into rampaging, virus-spreading ghouls.
  • The Scourge forces also expand on the standard reanimation of dead corpses due to there being a number of necromancers deliberately creating more dangerous undead, leading to zombie giants, giant zombie dogs, zombie dragons, and huge constructs made from combining the flesh of women and children.
  • Death Knights are subversion in that the one's that joined the Lich King willingly aren't dead at all. All the others are powerful warriors that died at the hands of the Scourge and were immediately resurrected as the Lich King's elite troops. Due to this they haven't had time to adequately decay and usually just have paler skin. Also they retain their memories and personality after being resurrected, though they are still bound to the will of the Lich King.
  • While Lordaeron and Northrend are of course the major victims of this trope, being the Scourge's bases of power, Duskwood in the kingdom of Stormwind is currently dealing with animated skeletons that (probably) have nothing to do with the Scourge. The town of Raven Hill is in ruins, and Darkshire is constantly on watch. Of course, they also have to deal with feral worgen in addition to the undead.
  • What happened to Quel'thalas counts, only about eleven percent of the original population survived.
• Warframe: The Technocyte Plague, a horrible virus that combines biological and mechanical systems and turns its victims into barely human mutants fused with mechanical parts. For the most part, they follow standard fast zombie procedure, mixing it up with some dog-like things, action bombs that explode when they get too close, and "Ancients" that spew toxin or interface screws. It was, of course, created by the Orokin in an attempt to fight the Sentients, who could subvert normal Orokin technology. Properly cultured and contained, it could mutate ordinary humans into the warframes. Unfortunately, the warframes were uncontrollably insane, and it was only when the Zariman 10-0 survivors bonded with them that they were tamed.
• WildStar has an extremely bizarre version, where the explosion of an ancient terraformer has mutated the local Squirg (mind-controlling alien squid) population, and the creatures are now raising the dead.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Chryssalids turn any human character into a zombie if they manage to kill them, as do the zombies themselves. In Terror missions, there are 18 civilians running around, and the squad members you bring along for the mission aren't safe either. If you don't get the situation under control, your squad will very quickly find themselves knee deep in shambling biting dead. Not to mention the Council mission "Site Recon" in Enemy Within is set in the aftermath of one: a fishing village in Canada gone silent, and XCOM sends a squad to investigate. When you get there, you find the whole place has been overrun by zombies and the Chryssalids that made them. Worse, the Chrysallids are using a whale carcass as a birthing nest.
• Even the Like a Dragon franchise has gotten in on the act — in the game Yakuza: Dead Souls (or Like A Dragon: Of The End in Japan), an outbreak of the living dead hits Kamurocho, and Kiryu Kazuma and crew have to take out the problem at its source as only they know how.
• In FunOrb's Zombie Dawn game, you play as the Evil Overlord responsible for the zombie apocalypse. Unlike most zombie apocalypse stories, these zombies are being controlled by someone — you. Also, the government is actually pretty competent. Anyone attacked by a zombie instantly comes back as one.
• Downloadable PC Game Zombie Driver casts the player as an Action Taxi Driver in the midst of an infested city where the outbreak was caused by a chemical explosion. The cabbie must rescue people trapped in various buildings and return them to an extraction point. He gets paid by the mayor for zombies killed and survivors rescued, so he can buy bigger and badder cars and weapons to run down zombies.
• Zombie Playground has you playing as a child during the zombie apocalypse fighting zombies at school.
• In Zombies Ate My Neighbors the zombies are fairly weak (they can be killed with squirt guns), and aren't contagious. However it is possible to temporarily be turned into a zombie by drinking a mystery potion, causing your character to wander around and kill any survivors they touch.
• Zombie Infection, true to it's title, where an outbreak in the Brazilian countryside courtesy of a MegaCorp turns entire populations of civilains into zombies. You're a soldier looking for your brother, and uncovers a dangerous conspiracy along the way.
• This is the background to Zombies, Run!, a fitness app game which you play by running in the real world. You are stranded near Abel Township, a settlement of survivors trying to hang on, get supplies, and defend themselves from the zombies outside the gates. Tasked with supply runs and reconnaissance missions through the zombie hordes, you are now Runner Five...
• Zombieville USA obviously involves this trope as the setting of the game.
• In the PS2 game Zombie Virus (The Zombie vs. Ambulance in Japanese), you drive around a zombie-infested city in an ambulance, attempting to rescue people and take them back to the hospital that serves as your home base so you can inoculate them against the zombie plague. If you take too long getting people back to base, they turn into zombies and start damaging your ambulance from the inside. And you can upgrade your ambulance so it can take more damage and more easily plow through hordes of zombies.
  • This game is part of the Simple 2000 series of budget titles, which also features a game called Onechanbara ("Zombie Zone" in the West), in which you play a bikini-wearing samurai girl who goes around slicing up zombies. While the gameplay isn't particularly brilliant, the game is definitely fun. It's proven so popular that sequels have been released on the Wii and Xbox 360, and there's even a movie. As a side note, in Oneechanbara, the Zombie Apocalypse is actually caused by the lead characters — well, they, and some of the villains. They have a "Baneful Blood" curse. If blood touches their skin, it builds power in them — with the downside that this power will eventually drive them insane and kill them. Meanwhile, their blood kills people and turns them into contagious zombies.

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