With Halloween on the horizon, and the first ever Zombies, Run! Virtual Race well underway, it’s time to check in with the good folks of Abel Township the Zombies, Run! fan community. But first, here’s a quick roundup of what’s been going on at Six to Start HQ in the past couple of months.
Six to Start News
2m Players: Zombies, Run! hit the Two Million Downloads milestone! To celebrate, we commissioned an awesome comic by Shannon Ehrola and created an audio montage of your Zombies, Run! Stories.
Virtual Race: We launched our first-ever Zombies, Run! Virtual Race and it’s been a huge hit so far. Your fellow Fives have already clocked up almost 6000km – and the race only started on Friday!
$10,000 of Awesome: Tabletop Gamer, Enterprise Crew Member, Runner Five? Wil Wheaton discusses the Seven Things he did to reboot his life. Spoilers: Zombies, Run! is one! It’s a personal, insightful article. Thanks for sharing, Wil!
App Development: As usual, we’ve been hard at work making Zombies, Run! the best it can be. Here’s a roundup of the improvements we’ve made in the past couple of months – including Interval Training on Android! – and our plans for the next couple.
Fond Farewell: Our lead artist, Estee Chan, left Six to Start this month, after five years of fantastic work. We’ll miss you, Estee!
And with that, it’s time to take a look at what you’ve all been up to since we last spoke! Hit the readmore for the full shebang.
Iron Zombies
ZR! Community stalwart Zalia has resurrected a long-standing favourite: Iron Zombies! It’s a timed challenge to create a piece of Zombies, Run! fanwork to fill a prompt within a short amount of time, and has produced an absolute mountain of wonderful stuff in the past week. Get more info about the challenge here, and investigate the tag to see just what a fountain of inspiration it is! The current round of the challenge is over for now, but hopefully it’ll be back soon!
Art
The artists in the Zombies, Run! community continue to be so creative and talented that it knocks my socks off. Take a look at some of the stuff that has left me particularly bare-feeted below.
Archie Jensen by sigeen [WARNING implied S2 spoilers in post]
Writing
Besides all the intimidatingly good fic that has been written for Iron Zombies, here are a few of the pieces I’ve really enjoyed in the past couple of weeks:
Somewhere I Belong by aphdinme – this is a really thoughtful, well-written exploration of why we run. Lovely.
Abel Outfitters by Maya_Koppori – What if Runner Five worked in a mall? AUs (alternate universe fictions) are a fun way to explore familiar characters, and this is one of the best. Putting ZR characters back in more “everyday” situations is a favourite trope of mine.
An Ode to Running by seoulsizzle – a powerful mantra for all of us runners.
Music Video
Finally, this month saw the release of Dr Mary Crowell’s “I Am Runner Five” music video, which features a number of our Runners Five! It’s a real blast – go watch it!
Stay safe out there!
Zombies, Run! 