Call of Duty’s Zombies mode may not be a game in itself, but it’s become so embedded in the franchise that even the realism-chasing Modern Warfare remakes eventually capitulated and added the iconic undead-bashing simulator to their ranks.
It’s not hard to see why Zombies made became popular among the Call of Duty fanbase. Each iteration of Zombies see’s CoD’s designers cut loose and push the envelope a little further with each iteration, resulting in delightfully daft scenarios like battling the undead menace on the moon or watching JFK and Richard Nixon team up to fight the zombie hordes.
Clearly, Zombies offers a welcome break from the po-faced melodrama of most Call of Duty campaigns. Yet the series’ most entertaining diversion was almost dropped onto the cutting room floor before a single player had the chance to decapitate a zombie in anger.
At 2015’s DICE Summit (via PC Gamer), Treyarch’s Mark Lamia revealed that Zombies mode was created by a group of developers eager to stretch their wings. These unsung heroes created the mode on their own, with no approval or oversight from the company bigwigs, and when Lamia was called in to get them to cancel the unapproved project he instead realized the group had a winner on their hands.
Lamia convinced Activision to let his team continue their work, resulting in seventeen years (and counting) of unfettered zombie-mashing fun.
