Valve‘s Left 4 Dead franchise is one of both PC and Xbox LIVE’s most popular multiplayer games, gathering four players to work side-by-side in a fight for safety from a horde of zombies. Irrational Games, developers of BioShock, had their own Left 4 Dead-like title in development years earlier; one that was never completed. It was titled Division 9 (no relation to District 9).
It had the same premise: drop players in a city full of zombies and limited resources and require strategical action between the players involved in order to get to safety.
“The reason we were frustrated with zombie games at the time was they never had the sense that you got for Dawn of the Dead, because there was really only Resident Evil at that time,” explains Irrational’s creative director Ken Levine. “That there was this group of survivors and they had to gather resources. They’d lock themselves up in the mall, and then be like ‘Oh, s—. We don’t have any food. We have to go out into the world and take these risks.’ And that was the game design, basically. You have a group of survivors, and these resources. You’d have to take on risks to get more supplies, ammo, and people. You sort of build up your group of survivors.”
“It had strategic elements, too,” adds lead artist Shawn Robertson. “Like getting the power back on for a certain section of the city. From then on, any missions you’d do at night would be lit.”
Apparently, the group didn’t think zombies would be such a big deal.
“I remember going around pitching it and the person would be ‘Zombies? Who wants to play a zombie game?’” remembers Levine. Joe McDonagh, Irrational’s director of creative development, adds with a laugh: “Someone said to me, ‘We don’t think zombies will be big in 2005.’”
The developer was ready to sell the game to Vivendi, when they were purchased by Take-Two. That eventually stopped the game’s development cycle.
“They were ready to buy it, but we had just sold the company to Take-Two. I think we would have been very successful with it. It would have come out around the same time as BioShock, maybe a little sooner.”
Without further adieu, see it for yourself.
Trailer For Irrational’s Scrapped Zombie Game [Game Informer]