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There once was a time where I lived a complicated life. I worked as a supervisor for a security company all week long, and spent my off time on one of my several hobbies or the occasional college class. At 22, I still had no clue what I honestly wanted to do. Life was going fairly well though. I had a steady income during a time when the economy was in a lull, and I was able to enjoy myself in my off time without too much worrying even if I did have a little debt. Truth was though; I was more concerned with unlocking ranks in Metal Gear Solid than I was in paying back the 8 grand I owed. Regardless, I had a going on in my life. I always felt like I never had enough time to juggle the little projects that I started on but never finished. That didn’t stop me, however, from picking up more. E3 of 2008 was such a pathetic display from the electronic entertainment industry that I even decided to try my hand at a small game development project as well…. Luckily, it was the one aspect of my life that truly bore fruit from my labor…. By spring 2011, I had assembled a small and inexperienced team to begin working on the second phase of our game along with my cofounder. This phase just so happened to coincide with an event that marked a turning point in the history of mankind. I may be getting ahead of myself though, so I’ll take a step back and start from the beginning.

In November of 2007 I started a new job as a Security officer on night shift while I attempted to go back to college. I quickly became a supervisor and befriended another supervisor by the name of Jesse Lopez. It didn’t take long before we discovered that we had much in common and shared creative ideas. Thus, we jointly began a project that summer to start development of our own video game. Early phases comprised of simply brainstorming ideas and writing short stories, but soon we had a solid idea of our goal and drafted other trusted peers. Knowing full well ahead of time that we were sorely unprepared for our task ahead, we decided to spend the first 12 months researching subject matter. Our game’s main focus was to play like a survival style first person shooter. As such, we spent weekends practicing marksmanship in the desert, and reading up on camping guides. I actually owned a .92F Beretta handgun that I became quite capable with. I even eventually purchased a concealed weapons permit and started carrying most times I left my home. It was not uncommon to see me walk around with 9mm on one hip and a combat knife on the other. By the holiday season we looked more like militia men than game designers, but the truth was that we weren’t game designers. It was just a dream for us, and we weren’t willing to admit that we had no clue what we were doing. Sure we knew exactly what we wanted in the game, and we could even visualize how it would play. We didn’t have any skills though. No one was a programmer. No one was a graphic designer. In March we pretty much ran out of practical excuses to keep reading Boy Scout handbooks. Almost at the point where we’d have to admit defeat…. Almost at the point where we’d wake from our dream…. We were instead granted a twisted sort of boon…. Our dream turned into the entire country’s nightmare….

March 17th is the supposed date of the beginning. They say that flight 291 was on a non-stop flight to New York City from Cairo, Egypt that landed that day at John F. Kennedy International Airport. This plane is supposedly the original leak into the United States of America. Apparently from that flight it spread in the terminal to 13 other states that day allowing a complete spread through the country in a matter of days. This infection I speak of is a virus. A virus that spread like wildfire in our homeland that is now known as the Wilopsky virus. Scientists claim that it is an airborne pathogen in its purest form. We would have been lucky for such swift death if this was the case, yet humanity has never made contact with an airborne version of Wilopsky. We were forced to suffer the torment of this plague the slow harsh way. Spread across the country in a day via the airplanes, but grew steadily and slowly from each individual city. It was the worst case for many. Too spread to combat effectively, but slow enough to traumatize so many who survived and kill so many more. Just to give you a clear picture of how this happened, on March 17th, 2012 at 6:15 A.M. flight 291 landed in New York City bearing the virus. Over the course of the next 18 hours, 13 other flights leaving New York contaminated the cities of: Phoenix, Las Vegas, Des Moines, St. Paul, San Diego, Chicago, Anchorage, Denver, Miami, Detroit, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Boston. This was all just in day one. I can’t comment as to the accuracy of these statements to be honest. Well, no, that’s not true…. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Phoenix, Arizona was definitely infected from day one. I can say this because when the first man in the state of Arizona became fully infected…. The first citizen to encounter a person completely lost, possibly in the entire country…. Was me…. I was the one…. Who found the first zombie….

It was March 17th (of course you know by now) and, contrary to popular belief, it was dead noon. It wasn’t something the happened in the shadows of the night. I was waltzing my happy little a** downtown near the courthouse. I was completely annoyed since I had jury duty, and I was unarmed because I didn’t want the hassle of the weapons check once I got inside the building. I just decided to make a cut across one of the parking garages to get to a coffee shop and it happened. Everyone talks about how they’d react to a situation, but once you’re in it things never go as planned. You watch some zombie flick and roll your eyes and some moron who falls into the grasp of an undead. Well, let me ask you this. In the sane normal world, where people go about their business as they should and your biggest worry is if you’ll have time to eat a bagel before going to the courtroom would you be worried about a ******** zombie?! No…. You wouldn’t…. You’d curse at some drunk and walk away, and that’s exactly what I did…. I had no clue how close I was to being dead in that moment…. First off, I was wearing my headset and listening to Led Zeppelin on my Zen MP3 player so I didn’t hear s**t (I’ve never listened to music outside since that day by the way). Secondly, nobody pays any attention to other people moving around in a car garage. But it was such a close call for me that you wouldn’t believe. I actually got caught. See, he grabbed me as I walked by. And most people who are grabbed are done for. The only saving grace for me is that I’m a naturally jumpy person. I immediately yanked away before he had a solid hold. Our confrontation was brief too. He moaned at me and held out one hand. I thought he was a drunk bum looking for a handout. I cursed at him and went on my merry way. I managed to get my bagel and still make it for the jury pool selection on time. I also managed to get out of actual duty itself as well. Hell, on the way home, I even noticed that the parking garage I’d walked through earlier was taped off by police and an ambulance was at the scene. At the time I was just thinking, “Lucky me for avoiding that barely.” I still hadn’t even thought about why it would be roped off or what had happened. I just thought I was on a lucky streak that day. It wasn’t until 3 days later that I’d even see any tabloids with the first rumors. Even then there was no official word for 2 weeks, and it wasn’t widely viewed as an epidemic for almost a month. During the 2 week period that we knew, the period that we could have done something, most people treated it like a joke. Hundreds of young adults became fodder with their “hunting parties” that would go out at night and search for undead armed with baseball bats and flashlights. The media and celebrities went on TV and downplayed the whole event as it were the flu. There were more contributing factors as well, but the honest truth is that nobody treated it with the seriousness it deserved. Now we’re putting it in history books like it was World War 3. But I guess I’m acting like and old timer here, cause as you know…. There is no was…. We’re still in this as deep as s**t, after all, it’s only been a few months….

Here’s the breakdown. Our development team, if you could even call it that, was small but ironically decently prepared for this due to the hands on research put into American Nightmare. We decided to go by the name Zed Studios temporarily and had a small staff. Jesse Lopez my cofounder and script writer and director, Mike Grutsky our lead designer and team coordinator, Alec Rearden our lead tech support, Paul Azzapardi our main play tester, and myself David Witt the cofounder and script writer and lead programmer. This makeshift team wasn’t qualified for any of our titles at all, but we all did research none the less. When the outbreak hit we were baffled, and we really didn’t know what to do at all. We were in the exact same situation as everyone else. We simply went about our normal business until it wasn’t possible any more. Then it was just like any classic zombie flick, find a place to hold up and pray you don’t die. Not really, we had a twist, we actually planned a scenario like this to use for reference, so we did have a safe house in mind to use as a level in the game. Not too surprising we all showed up there and had decent survival supplies in tow…. At one point Grutsky worked along side us as well, so the three of us were quite familiar with a particular business complex that we’d all visited often before. It was about a third of a mile squared property with 8 foot steel fencing all around. I wasn’t the first there though. Both Grustky and Jesse had made it there a few days before I did. Ironically, they apparently rolled up at almost the exact same time and went in together. I count my blessings that they beat me there and prepared the place as much as they did. It was a nice relief to show up and see the property fortified already. What I didn’t expect however, was an unfamiliar face staring at me down the end of a shotgun. Life is so simple now....