''I Made a Game with Zombies in It!'' (officially stylized as ''I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1''), is a

zombie A zombie ( Haitian French: , ht, zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in w ...

-themed

multidirectional shooter Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs ) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of charac ...

video game for the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

, available through the

Xbox Live Indie Games Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG; previously called Xbox Live Community Games; XBLCG) are video games created by individual developers or small teams of developers released on Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360. The games were develop ...

service. Released in 2009, it was developed by

Ska Studios Ska Studios is an independent game development studio founded by James Silva in 2007 after winning a contract to publish ''The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai'' to Xbox Live Arcade. Ska Studios has released four Metacritic-aggregated console games sin ...

and was designed entirely by company founder James Silva, previously best known for the

Xbox Live Arcade Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is a digital video game download service available through the Xbox Games Store, Microsoft's digital distribution network for the Xbox 360. It focuses on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent ...

game '' The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai''. The game was developed using

Microsoft XNA Microsoft XNA (a recursive acronym for XNA's not acronymed) is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment that Microsoft developed to facilitate video game development. XNA is based on .NET Framework, with versions that run on Win ...

, though its tongue-in-cheek description claims it was made using "Hypermagic Engine 3.0 and the Megacore X parallelization processor." The game's title makes excessive comic usage of features of Internet writing, such as

leet Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...

speak, overuse of exclamation marks, and

typographical error A typographical error (often shortened to typo), also called a misprint, is a mistake (such as a spelling mistake) made in the typing of printed (or electronic) material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual type-setting (typography) ...

s. It has since been re-launched through Steam in November 2021 and through Xbox Store in October 2022, and is currently still available for download.

Gameplay

The game features one to four protagonists viewed from an aerial perspective. Using two

analog stick An analog stick (or analogue stick in British English), sometimes called a control stick or thumbstick, is an input device for a controller (often a game controller) that is used for two-dimensional input. An analog stick is a variation of a joy ...

s, the players shoot droves of attacking zombies while collecting power-ups, with the objective of surviving until the game's background song ends. The game is timed by a 13:37-minute

rock Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...

-style background song sung by Silva himself with lyrics about the game itself. The song, which shares the same title as the game, was made available for download on the official Ska Studios website. The song was also released through the Rock Band Network, about a year after the game's release. Silva said Xbox Live's indie game price point inspired him to make "a $1 experience that delivers." He did not expect it to be a success, and that he was "half-expecting it to fail for being too stupid of a game."

Reception

The game was ranked 2009's most popular Xbox Live Indie Game based on connectivity. It sold 160,000 copies by January 2010, making it the top-selling Xbox Live Indie Game by more than 40,000 units. ''Zombies'' went on to sell 200,000 copies by March 2010 and jumped to 308,000 in sales by August 2010 making Silva roughly $215,000 after

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

's 30 percent revenue fee. The game became a favorite with critics, and was noted for its quirky sense of humor and theme song.

IGN ''IGN'' (formerly ''Imagine Games Network'') is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa distri ...

ranked it the best independent game of 2009. IGN writer Erik Brudvig said the game was extremely entertaining and "somehow about as insane as its title," despite the simple controls. ''I Made a Game with Zombies in It!'' won the 2009 Inside Gaming Award for Best Indie Game.

References

External links

Xbox Live Marketplace website
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100329084604/http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585502a6/ , date=2010-03-29 2009 video games Indie games Microsoft games Microsoft XNA games Multidirectional shooters Video games developed in the United States Video games with commentaries Windows Phone games Xbox 360 games Xbox 360 Live Indie games Video games about zombies Multiplayer and single-player video games Ska Studios games