Blizzard Veteran Founds New studio, Zombie-based MMO Announced

According to A Talk with Jeff Strain, a Blizzard veteran who founded ArenaNet and was NCsoft's President of Product Development before leaving, he has founded a new studio called Undead Labs and is planning a brand new title about zombies. The zombie-based MMO will be a console MMORPG.

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"You look at the name Undead Labs. There's a reason that is unique," he explains. "I'm very specifically setting out to make the best zombie MMO ever. This is what my company does and I wanted the aim of the company to reflect that and I wanted the people that work with me to share that passion for zombies and console games. Another part of it is that I don't intend to be a 300 or 400 person office. I think there are smarter ways to develop MMOs and my goal is to have a studio that can stay nice and small, but still really deliver content at that AAA level... the biggest thing for me -- when a team gets that big -- is the loss of culture, and the loss of identity. I would really like to build a studio that can maintain its spirit over time. It's going to take some very different thinking about production."

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About Undead Labs

Undead Labs is a Seattle, Washington-based game development studio that’s on a mission to take online gaming in bold new directions. Our singular focus is to create the definitive massively multiplayer zombie game (MMOZ) for console gamers. Nothing screams funny quite like wading into a group of rotting zombies with a lawn chair and a box of sharpened #2 pencils, and nothing says fun quite like doing it with your friends, whether online or on your couch.

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