Developer Irrational Games have finally revealed their plans for a zombie shooter that combined co-operative first-person shooter gameplay, base building, and tactical strategies with scarce supplies and loads of zombies. Titled Division 9, the game was planned prior to Left 4 Dead (in your face, Valve!). Irrational’s creative director Ken Levine explains how the game came about:
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. 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, shit. 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.
Strategic elements included mission where players had to turn the lights back on in the city, but it was the base-building that really separated Division 9 from the zombie game pack. Art director Nate Wells explains:
We also had some really odd notions of base-building mechanics. At some location, you could get a transmission from a doctor who was trapped. If you went out and got him and brought him back, you would have a doctor installed at your base. Or you' d find an engineer who could make new weapons. There was going to be a whole RPG-style base-building mechanic. But the real innovation was the concept that the zombies never stop. The zombies are infinite. And now, just a few years later, there are plenty of games that treat zombies that way.
So, with such a great concept, why did the game never get off the ground? Essentially, Division 9 started as SWAT 5, the sequel to SWAT 4 ordered by Vivendi, and the idea was to add zombies. When Levine pitched "Zombie SWAT 5" to Vivendi, he describes their response as: "crickets." Then Levine was told some horrible prognosticating.
Someone said to me, "We don't think zombies will be big in 2005."
To be fair, they were right. They weren't big in 2005. But they were two years later when Left 4 Dead took hold of the gaming community with its similar brand of co-operative survival gameplay.
*UPDATE*: So rather than have Division 9, we only have this *gameplay trailer* to show what could have been:
Source: GameInformer
