A few days ago, I clicked a button on my phone to send funds to a company in Singapore and so took ownership of the video game I co-created and am lead writer for: Zombies, Run! I am a novelist, I wrote the bestselling, award-winning The Power, which was turned into an Amazon Prime TV series starring Toni Collette. What on earth am I doing buying a games company?
Well. First of all. Zombies, Run! is special. It’s special to me – the game started as a Kickstarter and the community that grew up around it has always been incredibly supportive of what we’re doing. And it’s special in what it does. It’s a game to exercise with. You play it on your smartphone – iPhone or Android – and we tell stories from the zombie apocalypse in your headphones to encourage you to go further, faster, or just make exercise less boring. Games are so often portrayed as the bad entertainment form, but I made a game that fundamentally helps people to be healthier.
The experience of playing Zombies, Run! is also completely focused on storytelling. My co-creator Adrian Hon and I were talking about doing a project together. He said: “Let’s do something to make running more fun.” I said: “How about if we do a story where you’re being chased by zombies?” And here we are.
When you play the game, you’re immersed in a world where every run makes you a hero – you’re collecting supplies, saving a child from no man’s land, investigating the mystery of how the apocalypse started. I’ve always focused on the storytelling being good. And it works. Players of the game become so attached to the characters that many of them report laughing out loud or even “crying while running”.
One of my jokes about storytelling in video games is that the way we tend to talk about it – in the games industry, in games journalism, even in marketing copy – is very much “never mind the quality, feel the width”. We say things like “this game has 100-plus hours of story” or “this game contains more than a million words”. Imagine marketing a movie saying that the script contains 29,000 words. Or selling a novel on the basis that it’ll take a long time to read.
That’s not how you do it. You tell the story. You give a hook. You say: “A single woman comes home one evening to find a man claiming to be her husband living in her house. And when he goes up to the attic, a different husband comes down in his place.” Now you can’t wait to find out what happens next. (That, incidentally, is the brilliant comic novel The Husbands by Holly Gramazio – who I think is the only other bestselling novelist to be also making her own video games.)
So, now I own a games company, what am I going to do? My feeling is that I must focus on the fundamentals. There’s a world of games out there that thinks it can replace writers with AI large language models. I think that’s going to make writing worse and worse. AI writing is fine for boilerplate text that is always roughly the same. It’s fine for non-writers to get their expertise into the world. But storytelling is different. It is human minds finding companionship with other human minds – we need stories, fundamentally, to feel less alone. To know that other people have been through things a bit like what we have. Things that make us laugh, and cry, even while running. You get that from work that is not the same as everything else, you get it from the unique work of other individual human minds.
And actually, Zombies, Run! has always been a universe with strong values. We’re not a rightwing, rugged-individualism apocalypse, where one lone person can get through with just their guns. In our world – as in the real world – humans survive by working together.
While we’re still going to have many exciting fleeing zombies, battling-the-undead storytelling, I think there’s probably also room in the ZR! universe for a 10-mission arc where you have to find all the figurines and paints you need to complete an expansion set in “Demons and Darkness”; or one where you’re working on bringing an overgrown garden back to blooming, beautiful life; or setting up and running the first post-apocalyptic travelling library while also trying to work out what happened to the first librarian who’s mysteriously disappeared, leaving only a series of cryptic notes in an old manuscript.
After all, I do think this is quite a good time in the world to be thinking about how to rebuild after a series of catastrophic events.
Selling story by the yard and not by a story hook is a marker, I think, of a lack of confidence in the form. We don’t need to lack confidence. Games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to take ourselves seriously. Stop talking about the width, start talking about the quality.
What to play
It was the 20th anniversary of Xbox 360 recently, and one name that’s cropped up in every list of the console’s best games is the compulsive retro twin-stick shooter Geometry Wars. If you’re yearning for something similar, you must immediately download Evil Egg, a frenzied twin-stick blaster with gorgeous Commodore 64-style visuals and sound effects. Shoot everything that moves, hit the left trigger to boost and collect hearts to stay alive.
At first it’s a bewildering mass of rainbow pixels but as you detonate wave after wave of glitchy space pests, you begin to understand the patterns of different enemies and earn upgrades such as the executioner’s sword, which takes out foes in an orbital slash of laser particles. Evil Egg is polished, exciting, wild to look at, and has such a brilliant understanding of the genre and its unique dynamics. It’s free on Steam but I implore you to download it on Itch.io and name your own price. Keith Stuart
Available on: PC
Estimated playtime: 10-plus hours
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What to read
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There has been a lot of writing about Horses, the art game recently banned by digital platforms Steam and Epic Games Store. I particularly enjoyed this post by writer Harper Jay MacIntyre, which considers Horses, formalism and the trans experience. The article manages to bring in so many elements of modern games criticism and academia while providing a highly personal response to the game.
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The most interesting retro game articles are the ones that reassess lost or derided titles rather than merely celebrate the classics. Was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man the worst game ever? Not according to this compelling analysis from Garrett Martin at AV Club who sees it as a misunderstood brutalist gem. I find myself in agreement.
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It is also nice to see a legendary game justly praised in an interesting way. The BFI’s look at the legacy of Time Crisis considers the gun game in relation to cinema, referencing Beverly Hills Cop and Run Lola Run rather than just comparing it to Sega’s similar Virtua Cop.
What to click
Question Block
This one comes from reader, Rebecca:
“My elderly grandad is coming to stay with us for Christmas and wants to see what’s happening with video game graphics these days. Are there any titles you recommend that will let him explore beautiful locations without getting shot at?! We have a PlayStation 5 and a slightly out-of-date PC.”
Your best option here is to go with one of the big open-world adventures and just find an area with no enemies around. If you subscribe to PlayStation Plus Extra you could download and prepare the gorgeous Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which all give you quite quick (and safe) access to incredible vistas. You could bypass the threat of imminent violence completely by going for a driving game, such as Forza Horizon 4 on PC (which is set in Britain so he may even spot some familiar scenery). Alternatively, if visual realism isn’t as important as beauty, a cosier indie title such as Tchia, Journey or Firewatch may fit the bill. Really hope he enjoys them!
We’re still looking for your game of the year nominations for an end of year special – let us know yours by hitting reply or emailing us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
