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.
Today’s excerpt from the map features spoilers from the first 14 missions of Season 8, up to and including “Best Laid Plans”. Be Warned!
Stay Safe Out There!
We will be having scheduled downtime on our services over the next week. This includes our Content Distribution System, Zombielink, Rofflenet, and Racelink. Here are the likely impacts:
Rofflenet will be unavailable on Thursday 27th June from 11pm UK time (6pm EDT). It may be down overnight.
We will be switching Rofflenet to Read Only mode from 9pm UK time on the 27th to ensure that no data is lost. During this time, you will be able to read posts, but will be unable to make new posts or comments.
Our Content Distribution System will be unavailable for a period beginning 2am UK Time on Friday 28th June, and again from 11pm UK time . You may be unable to download new missions during the outage, and the service may be down overnight. This outage may also affect your ability to receive automated emails triggered by your progress through the game.
Our ZombieLink API will be unavailable for a period beginning 11pm on Tuesday 2nd July, and likely extending overnight. You will not be able to sync data to or from ZombieLink during that time.
All times listed below are in UK time.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, but we’d never let that stop us bringing you two new missions: On The Rocks & Best Laid Plans.
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.
Today’s excerpt from the map features spoilers from the first 12 missions of Season 8, up to and including “Poison Whiskey”. Be Warned!
Stay Safe Out There!
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.
Today’s excerpt from the map features spoilers from the first 10 missions of Season 8, up to and including “It’s Oh So Quiet”. Be Warned!
Stay Safe Out There!
To celebrate the launch of the latest in our Zombies, Run! New Adventures series, we spoke to Lulu Kadhim, writer of Track The Ripper about her thrilling dive into the story behind Victorian London’s most notorious denizen.
Who doesn’t love Jack the Ripper? The most fascinating thing to me is the fact we’re still captivated by the idea of him to this day. After spending much of my teenage years being obsessed with serial killers, I wanted to tackle Jack myself.
Catching Jack makes a great subject for a race, too — on the hunt through the old streets of London, all that atmospheric noise, and a burning question to be answered.
To keep it fresh, I tackled from a new angle: without going too far into spoiler territory, it was clear from the outset that the only satisfying way to end the run was to catch the Ripper. Therefore, I approached with a totally different question in mind: if the police caught him back in 1888, why don’t we know his identity to this day? This had all sorts of interesting implications, and I’m really excited to find out how people react to my answer!
The race is set the night that Jack plans on a double homicide. I took some liberties here with history, since the double homicide night was not Jack’s last hurrah — he murdered one other woman afterwards, Mary Jane Kelly.
But in other aspects, I tried to be as accurate as possible. There’s very little light on the streets, there’s a fair amount of smog and there are tensions between the City and Metropolitan police officers.
My favourite part of the research for accuracy was forensics! There were a huge amount of forensic developments happening at the time, with handwriting experts, ballistics, pathology etc. all coming into general police use. So I had a lot of things I could use without making it complete fantasy.
As for the language, I had to make it easy to listen to & understand — you don’t want to be distracted trying to work out what the heck anyone is saying while out on the run — but also “sounded” Victorian-era. I think I struck that balance after some fiddling, and most anachronisms left in were probably done on purpose!
The most fun part to write was definitely the last scene, but since I can’t talk about that without spoiling the race, I think the second most fun part was when the police find the first body.
Audio can be very atmospheric, so I put a lot of thought into how I was going to make it so. I wanted it to be clear it was night, that there was some hubbub around the body, and for it to hit the runner hard. The audio design by done Mark Pittam is incredible, and he really brought that scene to life.
I had a lot more about the tensions between the City of London police and the Metropolitan police, but I think I’m the only person who will miss those parts!
In the planning stage, I read a lot of articles and extracts from books to understand the Ripper murders, and the ways the police had handled them. I also went to visit the City of London police to get an understanding of the double murder, as well as police procedure at the time. I started collecting a folder of bookmarks with cool historical things I wanted to remember.
I then wrote 3 drafts of an outline, which went into details of what would happen each clip. The identity of Jack, and how it was revealed, changed each time, though the characters and structure stayed, more or less, the same.
Finally, on the third draft, I had that eureka moment, and realised there was a way for the story to work on more than one level, and for the reveal to be meaningful. That’s when I knew it was time to write it.
I hope they have half as much fun running it as I did writing it, really. While I baked deeper aspects into it, such as a look at power dynamics and certainly kinds of brutality common in the Victorian era (and arguably today), at its heart, it’s an exciting, fast-paced mystery!
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.
Today’s excerpt from the map features spoilers from the first 8 missions of Season 8, up to and including “Seal My Fate”. Be Warned!
Stay Safe Out There!
Squelch, squelch! Oh, don’t mind us, we’re just dragging this week’s new missions out of the mud: My Name is Mud & Seal My Fate are now ready to run!
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.
Yesterday, Wednesday June 5th, was Global Running Day. To mark the occasion, we held a massive ZR Merch Giveaway!
We tracked how far the global Zombies, Run! community ran collectively, and released awesome prize packages for lucky winners drawn from those who shared their run logs with the hashtag #ZRGlobalRunningDay
Zombies, Run! players ran 14,248km on Global Running Day 2019!
The prizes up for grabs are:
We’ll contact winners directly on Friday June 14th.
For more details, please read the Terms and Conditions for this giveaway.
Zombies, Run! 