From Zombie Zombie to Killing Floor 3: Four Decades of Gaming’s Undead Obsession

Let’s get this out of the grave: zombies shouldn’t be interesting anymore. They’ve been lumbering through our screens since pixels first learned to crawl. They’ve chased us in fixed camera angles, flooded our malls in low-res droves, and now they’re in Unreal Engine 5 with particle effects for each dismembered limb. And yet – here we are, 2025, still lining up to shoot dead things that were already dead, waiting for Killing Floor 3 to be finally released.

So how did we get here?

1984: The First Shuffler

Before Resident Evil was a glint in Shinji Mikami’s eye, we had Zombie Zombie on the ZX Spectrum. Released in 1984 by Sandy White, it was more a technical curiosity than a game by today’s standards – an isometric survival experience where you flew a helicopter around a city to crush zombies. If that sounds weird, it was. But it laid early groundwork: atmosphere, isolation, and the undead as systemic pressure rather than cinematic villains.

And that, weirdly, is what stuck.

The ’90s: When Horror Learned to Survive

If Doom taught us how to shoot demons, Resident Evil (1996) taught us how to fear the pause. Limited ammo, door-opening load screens, and zombies that didn’t sprint – they just kept coming. Capcom’s blend of horror cinema and resource management was brutally effective. Its sequel, Resident Evil 2 (1998), expanded the formula into a city-scale outbreak, added Leon and Claire, and essentially codified “zombie game” as a viable genre. It’s also the series that proved horror could sell.

Sidebar: Capcom wasn’t shy about franchising. Resident Evil eventually spawned seven live-action films (starting in 2002 with Milla Jovovich’s leather-clad canon-breaker), a handful of animated features, and a Netflix series that crashed and burned in 2022. But we’ll get back to that.

The 2000s: Satire, Splatter, and Swarms

By the early 2000s, zombies were everywhere – movies, TV, Halloween pop culture – and game devs leaned in. Some went full schlock: Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005) let you play as the zombie, farting your way through a retro-futuristic 1950s city. Others, like Dead Rising (2006), offered “what if Dawn of the Dead was a physics sandbox?” Set in a mall with thousands of zombies on screen, Dead Rising was absurd, grim, and gloriously dumb – weaponizing showerheads and chainsaws in equal measure.

But it wasn’t all camp.

In 2005, Resident Evil 4 rewrote the formula: over-the-shoulder aiming, real-time combat, and a shift from traditional zombies to parasite-infected villagers. It was less Romero, more Carpenter. And it changed third-person shooters forever.

2008–2012: Co-op Carnage and Online Apocalypse

Two games defined the late-2000s zombie boom: Left 4 Dead (2008) and DayZ (2012). One was tightly designed, AI-controlled chaos in a co-op wrapper. The other was emergent sandbox survival, where the real monsters were other players.

Left 4 Dead, from Valve, introduced the “AI Director” that changed enemy spawns dynamically, ensuring no two playthroughs felt the same. It also gave us the modern archetypes of special infected – the Boomer, the Witch, the Tank – and basically invented the Twitch streamer highlight reel.

Meanwhile, DayZ, a mod for ARMA 2, dropped you into a vast, empty map where food, water, and trust were all in short supply. It was janky, brutal, and completely unscripted – and it lit the fuse for the survival genre explosion.

Around this time, military shooter classic Call of Duty discovered zombies, too. Starting with World at War in 2008, Treyarch introduced the “Nazi Zombies” mode: a tongue-in-cheek, wave-based survival minigame that evolved into an entire lore-heavy, time-looped metaverse by Black Ops III. It was ridiculous – and kids loved it.

2013–2020: The Prestige Era

Then came The Last of Us (2013). Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic drama didn’t reinvent the zombie wheel, but it rebranded it. Its “infected” weren’t undead – they were victims of Cordyceps, a real-world parasitic fungus. More importantly, the game gave weight to every encounter. It wasn’t about killing; it was about surviving with some shred of humanity intact.

This wasn’t just a hit – it was prestige gaming. Awards. Thinkpieces. Crying grown men on Reddit. And in 2023, HBO adapted it into a TV series starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. The adaptation was one of the most critically acclaimed video game-to-screen efforts ever made. It did what few games-turned-shows manage to do: treat the story seriously without apologizing for the medium.

Compare that to Netflix’s 2022 Resident Evil show, which tried to combine bio-corporate lore and teen melodrama and somehow made both worse.

Plants, Nazis, and Other Strains

Of course, not every zombie game was post-human drama. Plants vs. Zombies (2009) proved the genre could be funny, charming, and family-friendly. A tower defense game where peashooters defend your lawn from an undead horde. It spawned sequels and spinoffs (Garden Warfare, Battle for Neighborville) and remains a rare case of mass-appeal zombie content that isn’t gory, grim, or exploitative.

Meanwhile, Zombie Army Trilogy and Zombie Army 4 (Rebellion) leaned hard into Nazi occult horror – a B-movie shooter series where sniper slow-mo meets necromancy. Pure pulp, no pretense.

2020s and What’s Next

Now we’re in the era of remakes, refinements, and Unreal 5 blood splatter. Resident Evil 2 Remake (2019) showed how to do it right – modern controls, gorgeous graphics, no nostalgia tax. The Last of Us Part II (2020) doubled down on narrative ambition and moral ambiguity. Dying Light 2 brought parkour and city-state politics to the apocalypse. Dead Island 2, long presumed dead, clawed its way out of development hell in 2023 and gave us Hell-A – a zombified, sun-soaked parody of Los Angeles.

And then there’s Killing Floor 3, set for 2025. Tripwire’s upcoming co-op shooter promises bigger Zed hordes, nastier bosses, and a slick Unreal Engine 5 coat of viscera. The trailer alone made clear it’s not trying to be deep – just fun, fast, and wet. Sometimes, that’s all you need.