I Maed a Gam3 w1th Z0mb1es 1n It!!!1
A twin-stick shooter where players survive until the song ends.
In 2009, Ska Studios and James Silva released a zombie shooter for Xbox 360 where players blast enemies until the music stops. Its title uses leetspeak and excessive punctuation. The game was built in two weeks with Microsoft XNA. It became the year's most popular Xbox Live Indie Game and won an Inside Gaming Award.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Ska Studios
- Publisher
- Ska Studios (Xbox Live); Microsoft Studios (Windows Phone)
- Designer
- James Silva
- Genre
- Multidirectional shooter
- Modes
- Single-player, multiplayer
- Platforms
- Xbox 360
- Windows Phone 7
- Windows
- Linux
- Xbox One
- Xbox Series X/S
Facts from the source article.
Gameplay
I Maed a Gam3 w1th Z0mb1es 1n It!!!1 is a multidirectional shooter for one to four players viewed from an overhead perspective. Using two analog sticks, players shoot attacking zombies while collecting power-ups, extra lives, and weapons such as machine guns, shotguns, and flamethrowers. Defeating zombies increases the score, and players must survive for the duration of the background song, a 13-minute and 37-second rock-style song sung by Silva.
Development and release
James Silva built this game with Microsoft XNA, having first learned game-making in a community college Visual Basic class. He later moved to DirectX games in Visual Basic 6 before switching to C# with XNA. The idea of a one-dollar price tag for Xbox Live indie games pushed him to craft a dollar experience that felt worthwhile. He coded the whole thing in two weeks. Silva told DigitalSpy he never expected it to take off and figured it might flop for being too ridiculous, but the opposite happened. The game hit Xbox 360 on August 16, 2009, and its song was posted for free on his site shortly after. A Windows Phone version, Z0MB1ES!!1 (on teh ph0ne), came out in 2011. A spiritual follow-up, TIME VIKING!!!!!ANDSPACERAPTOR, arrived on Xbox 360 in 2014. The original was re-released on Steam in November 2021 and on the Xbox Store in October 2022.
Reception
I Maed a Gam3 w1th Z0mb1es 1n It!!!1 became a favorite with critics and was noted for its quirky sense of humor and theme song. Erik Brudvig of IGN wrote that it was extremely entertaining and somehow as insane as its title, and that the mechanics are as simple as any twin-stick shooter like Geometry Wars. IGN staff ranked it the best independent game of 2009, and Xbox Live Director Larry Hryb ranked it at the peak of his Top Indie Game of 2009 list. Matt Gardner of Gametripper called the featured song one of the greatest songs to feature in a game, adding its spaced-out musical moments were a homage to Asteroids. Destructoid praised it as quite simply hilarious. Retroware called it the best song and one they will never grow tired of. A version of the song was released through the Rock Band Network about a year after its release. Destructoid's Conrad Zimmerman praised its creativity and gave a score of 9.5/10, but criticized that in multiplayer the display zooms out as players move apart. Juno Stump of Retroware said Silva unknowingly created a meme perfectly preserved in its time. By January 2010, the title had become the most popular and top-selling Xbox Live Indie Game. It sold 308,000 copies by August 2010, making Ska Studios roughly $140,000, and won the 2009 Inside Gaming Award for Best Indie Game.
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