Exclusive Interview with NOMBZ Lead Bren Lynne

Interview was written by Theo. Thanks Theo.

In an exclusive interview, BBGsite sat down with Bren "the cerebral connoisseur" Lynne from PowerUp Studios to discuss their upcoming title NOMBZ ONLINE, the browser-based cooperative multiplayer sequel to NOMBZ: Night of a Million Billion Zombies!

We wanted to know what technologies allowed such a game to be developed, what we could expect in beta, what they have planned for the future, and what in Sam Raimi's name took so long for such a game to be made! Bren tried his best to fill up our ...Big... ...Juicy... ...Brains... with such knowledge.

Hello Bren, thanks for sitting down with us. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your company and your game.

I'm Bren Lynne, Lead Developer at PowerUp Studios, in Vancouver, Canada. PowerUp is a small independent game developer that was founded in early 2007. We spent a year doing contract work, and then in March 2008 we released our first original IP, NOMBZ: Night of a Million Billion Zombies!

Being that this is your first IP, I must ask, why Zombies?

And why a million billion of them? I'm a huge horror fan, and I love the zombie genre in particular. Zombies are the reliable foot soldier in the horror monster army. Vampires, werewolves, aliens, they may come and go, but you can always count on zombies.

When you're developing a new IP, they say people want something new, but they also want something familiar. Zombies are perfect in that regard – everyone knows the rules and conventions of the genre, but there's still so much room for re-interpretation. A zombie story doesn't require a bunch of set-up or back story – you can get going with the action right away, and fill in the details as you go. That's the best way to tell a zombie story – drop your players or characters into a zombie outbreak, and let style and story just sort of emerge naturally. In that way, the zombies in Resident Evil can be distinct and different from the zombies in Left 4 Dead, or Dead Rising. Just as the zombies in Dawn of the Dead 1978 are different and distinct from the zombies in the 2004 remake, or 28 Days Later, or Return of the Living Dead. Sure, the zombies in L4D or 28 Days Later may not actually be undead, they might actually just be "infected" living, but we know they're still zombies, really. Hell, even Bill knows that.