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.
Timeline
All times listed below are in UK time.
Thursday 27th June @ 9pm: Rofflenet switches to Read Only Mode
Thursday 27th June @ 11pm: Rofflenet maintenance begins
Friday 28th June @ 2am: 1st Content Distribution System maintenance begins
Friday 28th June @ 11pm: 2nd Content Distribution System maintenance begins
Tuesday 2nd July @ 11pm: ZombieLink API maintenance begins
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!
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!
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.
What made you pick Jack the Ripper as the basis for the race?
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!
How historically accurate is the race to Victorian London?
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!
Which was the most fun part to write?
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.
Anything you would have loved to include but had time limits?
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!
How did you go about planning and outlining the race script?
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.
Is there anything you hope people take away from running 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!
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!
Prize Distribution
The prizes up for grabs are:
Top Prize: A 50% Discount Code for our online store, a copy of the Zombies, Run! Boardgame, a T-Shirt from our store, one entry to a Six to Start Racelink event, including Race Pack, a Zombies, Run! Gaiter and a Zombies, Run! Comic
Second Prize: A copy of the Zombies, Run! Boardgame, a T-Shirt from our store, one entry to a Six to Start Racelink event, including Race Pack, a Zombies, Run! Gaiter and a Zombies, Run! Comic
Third Prize: A copy of the Zombies, Run! Boardgame, one entry to a Six to Start Racelink event, including Race Pack, a Zombies, Run! Gaiter and a Zombies, Run! Comic
Fourth Prize: One entry to a Six to Start Racelink event, including Race Pack, a Zombies, Run! Gaiter and a Zombies, Run! Comic
We’ll contact winners directly on Friday June 14th.
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!
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.
Sync Errors
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.
Missing Artefacts & Buildings in Season 8
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.
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.
New Annual subscriptions will increase from $24.99 USD to $34.99 USD
New Monthly subscriptions will increase from $3.99 USD to $5.99 USD
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.
Zombies, Run! 