Aspyr Media Inc. announced Friday that its first originally-produced game, Stubbs the Zombie, ships to retailers for Microsoft’s Xbox video game console on October 17, 2005. The Mac and PC versions will be released in November, according to the company.
Stubbs the Zombie was developed by Chicago, Ill.-based Wideload Games, founded by Bungie co-founder Alexander Seropian. The game tells the tale of a traveling salesman who dies ignominiously during the Great Depression and is reanimated as a wisecracking zombie in the 1950s. The scene: The mythical town of Punchbowl, Penn., an “ultra-modern city of the future” complete with robots and hovercars, no crime and no pollution.
A rotting corpse reanimated from the grave is not what the upstanding residents of Punchbowl want to see, of course, and hilarity ensues as Stubbs takes on armed militia, riot cops, prisoners and other foes using his own body and his ability to possess his enemies as his weapons. Stubbs can recharge his health by eating his enemies’ brains, which has the added effect of turning them into zombies too.
Stubbs the Zombie was developed using the same engine that drives Halo, the popular first person shooter action game Bungie developed for the Xbox, which MacSoft later published for the Mac.
Featured in Stubbs the Zombie is a soundtrack released by Shout! Factory, mostly comprising covers of popular 1950’s music revisited by today’s indie bands and artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Flaming Lips, Cake and others.
Stubbs is available for Xbox for US$49.99. It’s rated M for Mature by the ESRB.