Into the Dead Will Hopefully Be a Genre Shift That Zombies Need

Into the Dead Will Hopefully Be a Genre Shift That Zombies Need

• Night of the Living Dead popularized zombies in mainstream media in 1968, and video games have always loved using zombies as enemies.
• Resident Evil and House of the Dead in 1996 opened the floodgates for zombie games, with modern titles like Dead Island 2 and Dying Light 2 using them as threats.
• While genre stagnation due to repetitive formulas has been noted, there are hopes for innovation with Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days. As a 2D sidescroller, it has the potential to feel very fresh.

While a few minor zombie-related movies were released between the 1930s and 1940s, it was George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead that really popularized the zombie genre for the first time in mainstream media. Pretty much as soon as the medium appeared, zombies would quickly find their way into video games, with the early 1980s game Zombie Zombie being one of the first major examples to feature them. But while zombies continued to creep in and out of video games for the next decade or so, the real onslaught began in 1996.

In 1996, Resident Evil and The House of the Dead were both released, making a gigantic impact on the gaming landscape and opening the floodgates for more zombie-themed video game projects. Since then, zombies have remained a staple of video games. But all these years later, zombie video games are starting to feel a little stale, though hopefully the upcoming Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days can light a fire under its competitors.

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It’s Time for More Experimental Zombie Games Like Into the Dead

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The Zombie Video Game Genre Is Stagnating

While there have been plenty of different types of zombie video games over the last few decades, the genre as a whole seems to have found itself in a comfortable rhythm recently, with its biggest games tending to fall into the same clear categories time and time again. These categories have often appeared soon after a zombie game has hit major levels of popularity, and rather than experiment with new genres, many subsequent zombie games have decided to just repeat the same formula.

There are a few key examples of this pattern in the last decade or so, and it all begins with Valve’s beloved co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. Released in 2008, Left 4 Dead – and its arguably more influential sequel – began a new trend that resulted in a swathe of middling AAA co-op zombie games, some of which have come out as recently as 2021. Dead Island’s release in 2011 is another key example, essentially establishing the formula for the majority of first-person zombie action games ever since.

While there are still a handful of zombie games every year that try their best to experiment, they’re often quickly overshadowed by the newest AAA zombie game to follow the same old formula. It’s obviously not the gaming industry’s biggest issue right now, but it is clear that the zombie gaming genre is stagnating somewhat, repeatedly choosing to iterate rather than innovate.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days Might Start a Chain Reaction

Announced back in December 2022, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days has a chance to really break the mold for the zombie video game genre. A 2D side-scroller, Into the Dead blends survival, stealth, and management mechanics together in an attempt to produce a truly unique zombie video game experience. While Into the Dead isn’t the first side-scrolling zombie survival game – with Deadlight being it to the punch over a decade ago – it does look like it could be one of the most expansive, and if it ends up being good, and ends up gaining a lot of traction upon release, then it could end up sparking a chain reaction that gets other developers to start experimenting with new genres of zombie video games.

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