This is an incomplete list of video games strongly featuring zombies. These games feature creatures inspired by the archetypal flesh-eating zombies seen in horror films, B-movies and literature, such as in the films of George A. Romero. Other variants such as the faster types of zombie inspired by the film 28 Days Later's 'infected' are also included. Particular zombie rationale and depictions vary with the source.
Zombies are common or generic enemies in video games. The ZX Spectrum computer game Zombie Zombie, released exclusively in Europe during 1984, is considered to be the first video game focused on zombies. Zombie games became more prevalent after the release of the survival horror game Resident Evil in 1996. This release, coupled with the 1997 light gun shooter The House of the Dead gave rise to "an international craze". Resident Evil sold 2.75 million units within the United States alone, its success resulted in it becoming a major horror franchise encompassing video games, novelizations and films.
| Name | Year | Platform | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alive 4-Ever | 2009 | iOS | Overhead shooter game where the player picks one of four characters and attempts to stave off a zombie horde whilst completing objectives. |
| All Zombies Must Die! | 2011 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | A downloadable top-down view shooter game with role-playing game elements. Up to four players must survive a zombie apocalypse. The sequel to Burn Zombie Burn!. |
| Alone in the Dark 3 | 1994 | DOS, Mac OS, Windows | Survival horror game set in an Old West ghost town. Paranormal investigator Edward Carnby must rescue Emily Hartwood, the other playable character from Alone in the Dark from a band of zombie outlaws. |
| Amy | 2012 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | Downloadable survival horror game. A scientist must escort an eight year old girl through a city devastated by an airborne virus that turns those infected into zombies. The scientist is infected and must manage her condition. |
| Area 51 | 1995 | Arcade, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Windows | Light gun game where players fight off an alien infestation inside Area 51 while fighting the personnel, who have been turned into zombies. |
| Atom Zombie Smasher | 2011 | Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | Real time strategy game viewed from a top-down perspective where players must coordinate military units in order to rescue civilians from a zombie horde. |
| Beast Busters | 1989 | Amiga, Arcade, Atari ST | Light gun game for up to three players, who must shoot their way out of a zombie-infested city with submachine guns. |
| Blood | 1997 | DOS | First Person Shooter An action-horror themed game set in the 1920s. The player plays as an undead henchman, on a quest for revenge. Zombies are common enemies the player will face in almost every level. |
| Blood Drive | 2010 | PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 | Vehicular combat game featuring six arenas filled with zombies, players control drivers who must either defeat zombies or other drivers, dependant on which level is being played. |
| Burn Zombie Burn! | 2009 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Mac OS X, | Zombies appear in waves and must be destroyed by being set alight. |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops | 2010 | Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Play Station 3, Xbox360 | First-person shooter. Minigame mod of Call of Duty Black Ops. Play alone Solo mod or 2-4 Co-op mod on Steam community on Windows and OS X or Play Station Network on Play Station 3 and Xbox Live on Xbox360. (Call of Duty: Black Ops#Zombies) |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops: Zombies | 2011 | iOS | First-person shooter spun-off from the zombie minigame in Call of Duty: Black Ops, up to four players can co-operate using voice chat to survive the zombie onslaught. |
| Call of Duty: World at War | 2008 | Microsoft Windows, Play Station 3, Xbox360 | First-person shooter. Minigame of Call of Duty World at War. First map is available if then complete the Campaign mod and your version is 1.0. In 1.4 version presented a new zombie map the Verrückt. In 1.6 presented a new map the Shi No Numa. In 1.6 version presented a new and last zombie map, Der Riese. This maps in PC downloaded free anyone, Play Staion 3 and Xbox360 is purchased. More maps created in Nazi Zombies particular mod. Zombie maps downloaded in ZombieModding or another places. |
| Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies | 2008 | iOS | First-person shooter set during World War II where a military bunker must be defended from attacking Nazi zombie soldiers. Based on the zombie mode of Call of Duty: World at War. |
| CarnEvil | 1998 | Arcade | Light gun game set in an undead-infested amusement park. |
| Carrier | 2000 | Dreamcast | Survival horror, an explosion aboard a large ship has released a virus which transforms the infected into mutants similar to the Resident Evil zombies. |
| City of the Dead | Cancelled | PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox | Based on George Romero's Living Dead series, this first-person shooter was shown at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo but dropped from release schedules when publisher Hip Interactive suffered financial troubles. |
| Cold Fear | 2005 | PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox | Survival horror, a coast guard receives a call to a Russian whaler. The player must survive alone on the boat filled with a horde of walking dead. |
| Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy | 2008 | Browser, Flash | A simplified real-time strategy game concerning warring students of an academy for corpse reanimators. |
| Corpse Killer | 1994 | 3DO, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn, Windows | A live-action light gun game featuring a soldier who must fight through an island full of zombies to reach 'necrobiologist' Dr. Hellman. |
| D2 | 2000 | Dreamcast | Survival horror, the player-character Laura Parton has survived a plane crash in the wilds of Canada only to find that other passengers on the plane are being transformed into zombie-plant hybrids. |
| Darkwatch | 2005 | PlayStation 2, Xbox | First-person shooter in a Wild West setting. A train robber has been turned into a vampire and must defeat enemies such as zombies and skeletons while trying to reclaim his humanity. |
| DayZ | 2012 | Windows | An ARMA 2 mod which features survival horror and shooter gameplay in an open world. The game is online multiplayer. Players must feed their character as well as deal with other players and the living dead. |
| Dead Block | 2011 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | Players must barricade themselves within a building while exploring to find items in order to complete each level. |
| Dead Frontier | 2008 | Browser | Free browser-based top down massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in an open world. |
| Dead Head Fred | 2007 | PlayStation Portable | Private investigator Fred is murdered, only to find him self reanimated and able to steal enemies' heads to perform different attacks. |
| Dead Island | 2011 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | First-person open world game set on an island inhabited by zombies. |
| Dead Nation | 2010 | PlayStation 3 | PlayStation Network dual-stick shooter. The game detects players' geographic locations and groups them accordingly within the game world, displaying players' progress in that region. |
| Dead Rising series | 2006 | PlayStation 3, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360, iOS | Third-person action games which allow the player to destroy zombies with various ordinary items and weapons, from benches and lawnmowers to guns and swords. |
| Dead Rush | Cancelled | PlayStation 2, Xbox | An third-person survival horror game featuring driving game elements. Announced at E3 2004 and set to be released in 2005. It was cancelled shortly thereafter. |
| Dead Space series | 2008–present | PlayStation 3, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360 | Science fiction survival horror games where necromorphs, generated from corpses infected by an alien virus, are the primary enemy. They are most effectively killed by "strategic dismemberment", cutting off their limbs. |
| Dead State | Unreleased | Windows | Role-playing game with turn-based combat set in the fictional town of Splendid, Texas. Players must defend their undead shelter, a school, while foraging for supplies and recruiting survivors. |
| The Evil Dead | 1984 | Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | The player, as Ash Williams, must fight the walking dead, reanimated limbs and other monsters whilst trying to defend a log cabin. |
| Evil Dead series | 2000–2005 | Dreamcast, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox | Trilogy consisting of Hail to the King, A Fistful of Boomstick and Regeneration. Ash from the Evil Dead films slices through Deadites, "zombified demons", with his arm-mounted chainsaw and double-barrel shotgun. |
| Flesh Feast | 1998 | Windows | 3D game in which the player must guide either a team of four characters or a single character through 17 stages of play, rescuing survivors and fighting zombies. |
| Fort Zombie | 2009 | Windows | Players must barricade themselves within a building and survive a zombie onslaught. |
| Ghoul Patrol | 1994 | SNES | Little-known sequel to the earlier Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The local library's goblin exhibit has come to life, the ghoul patrol must fight historical figures who have become zombies as well as other monsters. |
| Gloom 3 | 1997 | Amiga | First-person shooter, the player dispenses with zombies which explode in a shower of limbs. |
| The Grinder | Unreleased | PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360 | The Wii version is a grindhouse themed first-person shooter, the PlayStation and Xbox versions are top-down shooter games. The developer High Voltage Software originally revealed the title in 2009 as a Wii exclusive, later revealing a different version for the other consoles. Since that time the firm has laid off staff, leaving the status of the game's development in question. |
| Half-Life series | 1998–2011 | Windows, Mac OS X, several consoles | The player confronts several alien lifeforms that invaded Earth due to a teleport accident. The most prominent foes are humans zombified by some aliens called 'headcrabs'. |
| Horror Zombies from the Crypt | 1990 | Amiga, Atari ST, DOS | Platform game where the player enters a mansion full of zombies and other ghastly creatures. |
| The House of the Dead series | 1996–present | Arcade, Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, Wii, Windows, Xbox | Gory light gun arcade games on rails which feature numerous zombies. |
| Hunter: The Reckoning series | 2002–2003 | GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox | Trilogy of action games based on the role-playing game, one or more players are tasked with defeating the undead evil that manifests in the town of Ashcroft. |
| I Made a Game with Zombies in It! | 2009 | Xbox 360 | Released on Microsoft's Xbox Live Indie Games channel, up to four players shoot droves of attacking enemies, including zombies, while collecting power-ups. |
| Infected | 2005 | PlayStation Portable | Fast paced shooter game set two weeks before Christmas in New York City. Players assume the role of a rookie police officer and must rescue civilians from the marauding undead. |
| Isle of the Dead | 1993 | DOS | First-person shooter with adventure game elements, the player is stranded on an island filled with zombies. |
| Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death | 2003 | GameCube, PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox | First-person shooter, Judge Dredd faces numerous zombies, vampires and mutants whilst attempting to stop Judge Death from destroying the world's population. |
| Killing Floor | 2005–present | Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | A multi-player mod of the Unreal Engine. Players assume the role of squad members that must stop increasingly powerful waves of zombies. Ammunition is scarce but can be bought with points awarded for defeating zombies. |
| Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green | 2005 | Windows, Xbox | First-person shooter set within the same universe as the George Romero film Land of the Dead. Players control Jack, a farmer who must fight through different environments in order to find safety within the City of the Living. |
| The Last Guy | 2008 | PlayStation 3 | An overhead-perspective rescue game in which the player character is a humanity-loving zombie who must guide civilians to escape points in monster-infested cities. |
| The Last of Us | Unreleased | PlayStation 3 | Scheduled for release May 7, 2013. A plot-driven action adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Humanity has been decimated by a virus, the remaining survivors risk becoming contaminated and controlled by a fungus, turning them into zombie-like creatures. |
| Left 4 Dead series | 2008–present | Mac OS X, Windows, Xbox 360 | Multiplayer games in which four survivors must cooperate to survive a zombie apocalypse. Notable for not being horror-based, instead playing out like a movie, complete with level-specific posters, end credits, idle conversation, and even a message at the end of a level stating " were killed during the making of this film." |
| Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ | 2008 | Nintendo DS | A surreal game where an outbreak of zombies infects many classic fairy tale settings, leaving only Little Red Riding Hood and Momotaro to defend themselves from the invasion. |
| Lollipop Chainsaw | 2012 | PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 | An action game which stars a chainsaw-wielding cheerleader who must rid her high school of zombies. |
| Martian Gothic: Unification | 2000 | PlayStation, Windows | A science fiction survival horror starring three astronauts who investigate an incident in a scientific-research base on Mars. The trio must combat zombies while solving puzzles and piecing together what happened to the colony. |
| MediEvil series | 1998–2007 | PlayStation, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable | The series stars Sir Dan, a cowardly knight slain by a wizard's army. 100 years later the same wizard casts a spell to raise an army of undead, raising Sir Dan in the process. |
| Minecraft | 2009 | PC, Xbox 360, iOS | A survival sandbox game where you need to survive by building a shelter, and building tools to keep zombies and other monsters away. |
| Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge | 1991 | Amiga, DOS, FM Towns, Mac OS | Graphic adventure game. The series' antagonist, LeChuck the pirate, is reanimated as a zombie. |
| Nightmare Creatures | 1997, 1998 | PlayStation, PC, N64 | A survival horror game based in the nineteenth century. A devil-worshipping cult called 'The brotherhood of the Hecate' perform ungodly experiments in London to try to create super-humans but instead makes horrid monsters. It contains a wide array of creatures including zombies. |
| No More Room in Hell | 2011–present | Windows | A multiplayer focused Half Life 2 mod with a focus on survival rather than dispatching zombies. Currently in beta. The zombies are the slow-moving variety, though freshly turned cadavers move faster due to the lack of rigor mortis. |
| The OneChanbara series | 2000–present | PlayStation 2, Wii, Xbox 360 | Hack and slash games involving a bikini-clad female protagonist cutting swathes through an army of undead with a katana. |
| Pixel Force: Left 4 Dead | 2010 | Windows | A fan demake of Left 4 Dead. Unlike the source game, a first-person shooter, this game is an overhead shooter. |
| Plants vs. Zombies | 2009 | Mac OS X, Windows, Xbox 360, iOS | Tower defence game featuring a homeowner defending their home against zombies, which must be defeated by an assortment of plants with different offensive abilities. |
| Possession | Unreleased | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | The Enslaver, a traveller who was turned into a zombie through experimentation, seeks revenge by converting humans into zombies and commanding them to attack the living. |
| Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend | 2005 | Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | Expansion pack for first-person shooter game Postal 2 featuring a zombie attack on the fictitious town of Paradise. |
| Project Zomboid | Unreleased | Windows | An isometric zombie survival role-playing game under ongoing development. |
| Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare | 2010 | PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 | Downloadable content for the open-world wild west game Red Dead Redemption. Players try to find a cure for the plague which is turning locals into zombies. |
| Resident Evil series | 1996–present | Various | Survival horror series featuring flesh-eating zombies created by synthetic means, such as infection with the fictional T-virus. |
| Return to Castle Wolfenstein | 2001 | Linux, Mac OS X, PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox | First-person shooter from the Wolfenstein series, players fight nazi soldiers and numerous zombies. The object of the game is to prevent the raising of an army of undead nazis. |
| Rise of Nightmares | 2011 | Xbox 360 | The game uses full-body control via the Kinect motion sensor, players attack zombies using different types of weapons which degrade over time. |
| Rock of the Dead | 2010 | Wii | Players must bring down attacking zombies with music by using a guitar controller. |
| Shadow Man | 1999 | Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Windows | Players assume the role of Mike Leroi, who is cursed to be a zombie slave but has also been chosen to be the Shadow Man. Shadow Man is able to travel between the living world and Deadside, which features zombies and flying corpses. |
| Shellshock 2: Blood Trails | 2009 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | First-person shooter, a zombie outbreak in Vietnam during the Vietnam War is caused by a virus called WhiteKnight. |
| Siren series | 2003–present | PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 | Survival horror series. The primary enemies of the game, "shibito" (屍人?), are living dead who can be 'sightjacked' by the player, allowing them to observe the gameworld through the shibito's eyes. |
| Space Pirates and Zombies | 2011 | Windows | A shooter game set in space, containing role-playing and strategy elements. The titular zombies emerge late in the game and operate in a similar manner to the Borg of Star Trek, by assimilating space ships and crew into an undead horde. |
| Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse | 2005 | Mac OS X, Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360 | A third-person comedy game played as the titular zombie. Humans are converted into zombies when killed by Stubbs, creating an army of zombies. |
| Survival Crisis Z | 2004 | Windows | Features two different play modes, story and arcade, the former involves surviving a zombie holocaust by scavenging and interacting with other survivors, the latter is a straightforward shooter game. |
| Sweet Home | 1989 | Nintendo Famicom | One of the first survival horror games, it featured zombies as enemies representing previous visitors who never made it out of the mansion alive. |
| Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys! | 2008 | Nintendo DS | Platform game with puzzle elements, players control three zombies with different abilities in order to thwart the alien brains which have invaded Earth. |
| They Hunger series | 1999 | Windows | A trilogy of single-player mods for Half-Life, the first is set in a rural area of the United States of America. Later in the series settings such as missile silos are explored. |
| Touch the Dead | 2007 | Nintendo DS | On-rail, first-person shooter. A prisoner named Rob Steiner escapes from jail while battling countless zombies, the player attacks by using the console's touch screen. |
| The Typing of the Dead | 1999 | Dreamcast, Windows | A touch typing trainer version of The House of the Dead 2. |
| Undead Knights | 2009 | PlayStation Portable | A hack 'n slash game featuring a trio of undead knights who can reanimate their victims as zombies and send them into battle. |
| Urban Dead | 2005 | Browser | A massively multiplayer online game where players choose whether to play as a human survivor or a zombie in the battle for control of a quarantined city. |
| Voodoo Kid | 1997 | Windows 95 | The artistic concept of the game is heavily based on voodoo culture. All characters excluding the unnamed protagonist are soulless zombies bounded to a ghost ship. |
| The Walking Dead | 2012 | Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360 | Based on the comic series and being developed by Telltale Games, this licensed video game is due to be "multi-year, multi-platform, multi-title". |
| Warcraft III series | 2002, 2003 | Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X | The Undead Scourge race contains classic flesh-consuming zombies (Ghouls and Abominations). The Forsaken race in the later World of Warcraft MMORPG are zombies who had rebelled against the Scourge. |
| WarZ | 2012 | Microsoft Windows | WarZ is the world's first survival MMO Zombie Game, with FPS and RPG based gameplay |
| World of the Living Dead | Unreleased | Browser | Online game currently in open beta testing. Players compete for resources in order to keep their group of survivors alive in a zombie plagued Los Angeles. |
| Yakuza: Dead Souls | 2011 | PlayStation 3 | Part of Sega's Yakuza series, the martial combat of previous titles has been replaced with an emphasis on gun battles. The city has been infected with a zombie plague and now a third of the population are zombies. |
| Zombi | 1990 | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, ZX Spectrum | Icon-driven graphic adventure inspired by the film Dawn of the Dead. A group of survivors is forced to land their helicopter atop a zombie infested shopping mall, the vehicle must be refueled so they can escape. |
| Zombie Apocalypse | 2009 | PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 | The player has to shoot or decapitate zombies across seven different areas. |
| Zombie Parkour Runner | 2011 | iOS | A parkour game where the player must retrieve the items stolen from them by zombies. |
| Zombie Driver | 2009 | Windows | An overhead-view mission-based driving game taking place in a zombie apocalypse. |
| The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned | 2009 | PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360 | Zombie-themed downloadable content for Borderlands featuring a swamp island filled with undead. |
| Zombie Lane | 2011 | Facebook, Google+ | A top-down/third person social networking Facebook game. Players must repair their neighbourhood after a zombie apocalypse and locate their missing wife and dog. |
| Zombie Massacre | 1998 | Amiga | First-person shooter, fourth game in the Gloom series. |
| Zombie Nation | 1990 | NES | A mysterious meteor called Darc Seed crashes to Earth and turns the inhabitants of the United States into zombies. Players control a disembodied samurai's head which flies across the screen and fires eyeballs and vomit at enemies. |
| Zombie Panic in Wonderland | 2010 | Wii | WiiWare game likened to the arcade game Cabal, players move their character left or right along the bottom of the screen while attempting to rid nine stages of zombies. |
| Zombie Panic! Source | 2007 | Windows | A multiplayer Half-Life 2 mod, in which players are divided into two teams, survivors and zombies. When survivors are killed, they become zombies. |
| Zombie Revenge | 1999 | Arcade, Dreamcast | Beat 'em up where players choose one of three characters to pummel zombies. |
| Zombie Tycoon | 2009 | PlayStation Portable | Downloadable real-time strategy game. Players control three teams of up to eight zombies to attack the living. |
| Zombie Wranglers | 2009 | Xbox 360 | An Xbox Live game where players choose one of four characters to "wrangle" zombies through twenty levels. |
| Zombie Zombie | 1984 | ZX Spectrum | The player must rid a city of the undead by luring them over the edge of structures. These can be constructed with a helicopter, which can be landed to allow the zombies to pursue the player character. |
| Zombies | 2011 | Windows Phone, Xbox 360 | |
| No Zombies Allowed | 2012 | iOS | Zombie hordes are looking to take over and munch on survivors. It’s up to YOU to save your town. Start by recruiting survivors and building up your town. And remember…NO ZOMBIES ALLOWED! |
| Zombies Ate My Neighbors | 1993 | Mega Drive, SNES, Wii | Shooter game played from an overhead perspective. The game parodies B-movies and features zombies amongst several other types of monster. |
| ZombiU | 2012 | Wii U | First person shooter, launch game for the Wii U console. |
Famous quotes containing the words video games, list of, list, video and/or games:
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“All is possible,
Who so list believe;
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by license and leave,
All is possible.”
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)
“I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)