Being naughty earns you a lump of coal, so be good and join us for Fear of The Dark & On The Hunt.
You can download these missions right now from the ‘Missions’ tab. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.
This Season, we’re taking you on an adventure to the distant Far Hebrides archipelago in Scotland, where you’ll encounter a whole host of new friends – and enemies. To make your journey even richer, we’ll be publishing a map of the Far Hebrides, which will expand and gain detail as we progress through the series.
Our first excerpt from the map features spoilers from the first 4 missions of Season 8, up to and including “Radio Ga Ga”. Be Warned!
Stay Safe Out There!
It’s a discussion that everyone must have at some point in their lives, one that has haunted mankind for years. Who would you have on your zombie apocalypse survival squad?
We’re no strangers to this question here at Six to Start – after all, we spend a pretty big chunk of our time considering the undead and making them come to life in Zombies, Run!. And now we set out to answer that most pressing of questions as we ask the team, which Zombies, Run! characters would you choose to support you in the zombie apocalypse?
I am under absolutely no illusions about my survivability in the apocalypse. I’m asthmatic, hard of hearing and generally cowardly. So my priorities are a little different from everyone else’s: I want to pick the five folks with whom I will have the most fun before the inevitable happens. This is my Zombie Apocalypse Party Squad.
First up, unsurprisingly, is Mr Party himself Jack Holden. He began the apocalypse at a rave, and I’m counting on him to help me get my post-apocalyptic party started. A keen musical ear and an… idiosyncratic dancing style mean Jack’s going to be my main man on the dance floor.
No party is complete without supplies and no-one’s better equipped to get them than Amelia Spens. Whatever we need, she’s sure to be able to get her hands on it, and she’s well known for her own decadent tastes. So long as we all agree to let her manage the guest list, we should be well taken care of.
At every great party, there’s a moment where you see through the crowd someone you didn’t think would turn up and are greeted with the biggest hug ever and it makes your night. I’m inviting Sam Yao for just that purpose.
No-one can go hard all night, so it’s always good to have some folk around who you can rely on for fascinating conversation while you catch your breath. It’s also nice to have someone there to reassure you that your dancing looks as good as you think it does. Who better to hold down both roles than Dr Lobatse? No matter what point the evening gets to, she’d make it better with a story from her past. I really do think she’s the most interesting person in the world.
And finally, the most crucial person for a good party is the friend who’s not only a metric tonne of fun while the music’s playing, but who’ll help you do the dishes in the morning while you pick over the previous night’s events. It’s a huge boon if they also make a lovely cup of tea. Jody Marsh, come on down!
Who’d be in your Abel Apocalypse Party Squad? Tell us in the comments!
Hello Runners! We wanted to make you aware of some bugs in our latest 8.0 release and let you know what we’re doing to deal with them. We never want technical issues to get in the way of your surviving the apocalypse, so repairing issues like these are our number one priority.
Since the 8.0 update on iPhone, users have reported error messages reporting syncing issues when they start the app. We’re preparing a fix right now and hope to have it in your hands soon. In the meantime, please do not uninstall Zombies, Run! – doing so will not fix the problem, and may lead to you losing run data. Please wait for the app to update, and keep an eye on our official Twitter account for more information.
With the launch of Season 8, an error in our content pipeline led to the missions releasing without their associated Artefacts, Buildings and Milestone emails. We’ve now fixed this.
If you have already completed Season 8 Missions 1, 2, 3 or 4, the relevant Buildings will unlock automatically when you next sync your app.
To unlock Artefacts and Milestone emails, you’ll need to re-run Season 8 Missions 1, 2, 3 and 4 if you’ve already completed them. If you want to do this quickly, you can start these missions on “Constant Pace” mode, with the mission length set to the shortest possible time and no zombie chases, and then let them run while you do other things.
Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience. We want to bring you the best running experience possible, and we hate to see issues like these get in the way of that.
Stay safe out there!
High tide has washed ashore two new missions: Big Mistake & Radio Ga Ga.
You can download these missions right now from the ‘Missions’ tab. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.
In our very first New Adventure for Zombies, Run!, you’re travelling back to 1804 to accompany Lewis & Clark on the Corps of Discovery Expedition from Pittsburgh, PA. all the way to the Pacific coast – that’s 3,700 miles!. You’ll be guided through the route by your personal automated travel companion who’ll also make sure you don’t get lost in time!
Sadly, we can’t actually send you back in time (yet!), but we hope that our New Adventure will give you a vivid glimpse of history. We’ve spoken with Alex Acks, the writer of the Lewis & Clark story, about their experience of researching and writing the race!
I was pitching ideas for historical journeys, which are a bit harder to come by than you might think. Or more, ones that are famous enough to be recognizable and yet self-contained enough to be made into a run aren’t that common. Lewis & Clark is one I hit on because it met those criteria, and because I knew just enough about it to know it would be exciting before I started more in-depth research.
I think it was also on my mind because I’d recently visited my parents in Boise, and there’s a statue in the Idaho Botanical Gardens of Sacagawea, with a bunch of plants that she showed to Lewis planted around it. So there was an opportunity to look at a historical expedition with a female member!
The journey is so long in both distance and time that I wanted a device that would allow us to skip to the interesting bits, so to speak. Because a lot of it was a day to day slog of men walking long distances and eating appalling amounts of boiled meat.
The bit in Montana, which may not be the most exciting or historically significant… but to me, it was an opportunity to try to describe what the mountain west is like to people who have never seen it.
In Stephen E. Ambrose’s book UNDAUNTED COURAGE, he described how Lewis and Clark were basically acting as arms dealers to the Native Americans too. While they didn’t actually trade many guns – they couldn’t, because they needed them for their own party to hunt – they were out there showing off American weapons technology to people who hadn’t seen it yet. And then of course, the big sales pitch was effectively, “we’ll sell you all these super awesome guns, but you’d better only use them to hunt animals – no shooting the other Native Americans!” Which I actually found really funny in a horrible way, because boy have things not changed.
I really wish I could have gotten more in there about the part of the mission that was diplomacy with the Native Americans. There were a lot of little incidents, both hostile and not that would have added dimension.
Also, you’ll notice that this is only half the journey. After the winter, the party had to turn around and go all the way back, and there are definitely some interesting stories as well. Though part of why I cut it off at the arrival to the Pacific is that the return journey has a real downer of an ending: after his triumphant return, Lewis basically squanders all of the goodwill he’s earned, does a terrible job of being the governor of all the new territory, and then shoots himself.
I looked at a lot of timelines and maps of the journey that were already written, and then tried to match up the major points with interesting stories that could go with them… like the arrival in Montana coinciding with them encountering their first grizzly bear.
Something that I’m not confident I did the best job with–the fact that viewed from one side, this was a massive journey into an unknown continent… but the continent wasn’t really unknown. There were lots of people living there already, who obviously knew their land well and were often extremely welcoming toward a nation that was set to treat them very poorly in short order.
So there’s a tension between this exciting, cool journey where people basically walked across the really wide bit of America, which is an enormous undertaking by any standard… and just the very idea that the purpose was to map “purchased” land that didn’t actually belong to the people who had sold it.
Also, on a lighter note, America is ridiculously big and mountains make everything difficult.
The Lewis and Clarke race is available in the New Adventures tab of the Zombies, Run! app now! Thank you very much to Alex Acks for talking with me about the race. You can find them at https://katsudon.net/
The wait is over! Get your running shoes on, pop your headphones in and join us for the first two missions: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea & Aftershock.
Over the coming months, we’ll have new missions, new base buildings, and new artefacts to discover.
PLUS over in our New Adventures tab, available to players on Zombies, Run! 8.0, you’ll find Lewis & Clark, an all-new training training mission & race from writer Alex Acks. Perfect for new players & veterans alike, these missions are set outside the Zombies, Run! canon.
We’ll be releasing a total of 30 missions this season – two per week, with a brief mid-season hiatus. But don’t worry, we’ll have something extra special to fill your hiatus woes — stay tuned!
You can download these missions right now from the ‘Missions’ tab in the all-new iPhone or Android app. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.
Get ready, Runner 5, because you’re about to see one of the biggest updates to Zombies, Run! since its launch! We’re bringing new stories for beginners and veterans alike, and we’re adding one of our most-requested features ever.
Raise the gates – and update your app via the App Store and Google Play!
Storytelling + gameplay = awesome running experience. We think Zombies, Run! has proven that handily, and that’s why, for the first time ever, we’re bringing new adventures to the app. Every month, you’ll see a new story, ranging from epic thrillers and races against time to exciting historical and scientific adventures.
We’re kicking off with Lewis and Clark, a two-part story by Alex Acks where you’ll follow the footsteps of two of the most famous American explorers of all time on their 6000km+ journey across the continent.
Next month, you’ll be hot on the heels of a murderer in Track the Ripper by Lulu Kadhim. Are you fast enough to stop the Ripper from cutting a deadly swathe through Victorian London?
And this summer, prepare for an epic five-part sci-fi adventure, Venus Rising, written by Elliott Gresswell and Naomi Alderman (ZR co-creator and Lead Writer). Featuring the ZR cast in an all-new setting, this is a run you can’t miss.
The best thing? All of these New Adventures can be played by anyone, no matter how far along you are in Zombies, Run! We’re incredibly excited to be making your walks, jogs, and runs more fun and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
Tomorrow, our biggest adventure – by far! – will continue in Season 8 of the main Zombies, Run! story, where you’ll be journeying to a mysterious location in the Far Hebrides, a chain of islands north of Scotland. Luckily, you’ll have some of Abel’s finest on your side – and for the first time, we’ll be releasing a map of your travels as you go along!
The first half of Season 8’s 30 missions will release weekly starting tomorrow, with the second half coming later this year…
There’s nothing worse than discovering your phone has run out of battery during a mission, and losing your hard-earned progress and supplies in Zombies, Run! That’s why, starting with ZR8, if the app quits during a mission for whatever reason – battery running out, closed by mistake, a crash – then we’ll save all of your run log, distance, time, supplies, and progress up to that point.
This is possibly our most-requested feature ever: one that we hope you’ll never need, but one that you’ll be glad to have if you do! Even better, you don’t need to do anything to make this work; when you restart the app, you’ll just see your in-progress run log saved in the usual place.
We’re building on the foundation of our complete redesign in ZR7 by making ZR8 even easier and faster to use, particularly for finding and starting runs. Run settings are now re-organised and easier to find, and we’re making better use of the screen so we can show you more information and options.
There’s also new helpful tips and advice for the thousands of Runner 5s who join us every day, and lots of tweaks and improvements for veteran residents of Abel!
Behind the scenes, we completely reworked the content management system in the app, which means it’s faster and more reliable, particularly on older devices and Android phones.
We’ve got a lot more planned this year, which we’ll be sharing here on our new blog! Not just updates about the app, but also interviews with our writers and behind-the-scenes looks at our production process. Stay tuned, and stay safe out there, Runner 5!
With Season 8 of Zombies, Run! on the horizon, it feels like we’ve been around forever. A lot of things have changed since we first launched Zombies, Run!, and with plenty of plans for the future, we thought it was time to take a look back at where our apocalypse began.
2011
Back in the mists of time otherwise known as 2011, Six to Start boss, Adrian Hon, and novelist Naomi Alderman came up with a thrilling idea; a fitness app that made you run by tapping into your desperate need to escape hordes of the undead. And so, Zombies, Run! was born.
The Kickstarter launched in late 2011 asking for the modest amount of $12,000. The enthusiasm for it was overwhelming, and in the end, it raised over $70,000 – a smashing success for the early days of crowdfunding.
We’d never made anything quite like this before, so the development was a bit of a learning curve. We didn’t have a studio so audio was recorded in a bedroom in the director’s flat. Not the most high-tech of setups!
2012
But it all paid off. We released Zombies, Run! in 2012 when it quickly became the top grossing health and fitness app on iPhone. The Android version of the app quickly followed. What we’d anticipated being a story that lasted for a single season, quickly became so much more.
The 5K training app was released later in 2012, and we already had bigger plans ahead. Season 2 development was well under way, and this time there were no more duvets on bedroom walls to muffle the sound – we had a sound booth!
2013/2014
Seasons 2 and 3 brought a lot of changes and let us stretch our legs a little. We completely overhauled the app and introduced the base builder in the form that we know and love today. With 60 missions each, these seasons were bigger than ever. We brought on more writers and even got a cameo appearance from Margaret Atwood herself!
These seasons allowed us to play around with our format. In Season 2 we introduced side-missions – extra stories that added a bit of variety to the season.
In Season 3, we tried our hand at introducing multiple choice missions, where runners could choose what story branch they wanted to take. It was fun to experiment with our format and play with what we could do with audio storytelling!
2015
2015 was a year of big events for us. In January, we hosted our very first live show at the V&A museum. Fans volunteered to be made up into gruesome zombies, or to play Runner 5 and be chased around one of the galleries, acting out a mission written specially for the night.
The biggest change came with the release of Season 4. Apps had changed a lot since 2012 when we first released Zombies, Run!. There was more competition than ever, and freemium apps had become the norm. The change to having a subscription system allowed us to make Zombies, Run! our focus, and also to enact a few other plans.
Our very first Virtual Race also made its debut in October 2015! This was much more limited in scope than our current race, but the enthusiasm for our Runners 5 was undeniable, and that spurred us on and the races have become a fixture of our calendar with the eighth virtual race coming up.
2016
By 2016 we’d settled into our season release format, and turned our sights to other projects. 2016 saw the release of the Zombies, Run! Book and our audio drama ‘The Way of All Flesh’, a prequel to the main story which contains a few familiar voices.
We also launched the Kickstarter for our very own board game! While we had a prototype ready to go, the Kickstarter let us go into production with it, including creating a fully voiced companion app. This was finally brought to fruition in late 2017 when we received the final copies of the game, and were able to launch it at long last!
The Future
We’ve settled into our groove since then, producing two races a year, alongside a full length season of Zombies, Run!. While we might have been a little quieter, that doesn’t mean that we’ve been slacking. As always we’ve been working in the background to make improvements to the app and to add a few new features such as our Statistics screen. We’ve also been able to add support for the app on Apple Watch and Android Wear, and late 2018 saw us introduce Siri integration to Zombies, Run! on iOS, letting people really ‘raise the gates’ at the start of a mission.
And we’ve definitely been thinking about the future. Next month, we’re launching Season 8 of Zombies, Run! alongside our 8.0 update to the app – and our latest big addition, ‘New Adventures’. Stay tuned…
Attention, Runners Five! Beginning from Monday May 13th 2019, we’ll be increasing the price of all new Zombies, Run! subscriptions, as detailed below. These price changes will only apply to new subscriptions; if your subscription begins before that date, these increases will not affect you unless you allow your subscription to lapse without renewing it.
Legacy subscriptions will be unaffected by these pricing changes, as will all active subscriptions begun prior to Monday May 13th.
Since we first created Zombies, Run!, we’ve been committed to striking a balance between affordability and sustainability. We want to make a game that will reach as many people as possible while also ensuring we’re able to continue supporting it to the standard we believe our players deserve. That’s why we put our prices up only when we believe it’s necessary to make sure we can keep giving Zombies, Run! the attention it deserves, and why this is our first price increase in over two years.
Increasing the cost of new subscriptions allows us to increase the resources we can dedicate to improving Zombies, Run!, and to creating a wider range of the amazing content you love to run to. We believe our new subscription prices still represent great value – less than ten cents per day, or the cost of one cup of coffee per month! We hope you’ll agree that your time at Abel is worth it.
Stay safe out there!
Zombies, Run! 