Survive the Outbreak!

10/14/2008 06:55 PM by Chris Toohey

Think you can survive the zombie apocalypse? Now's your chance to prove it! Chris Lund of SilkTricky has put together an interactive online zombie movie over at SurviveTheOutbreak.com. Horror buffs (like me) and especially zombie buffs (again, like me) will love it! A short movie with solid writing, acting, and directing that prompts you to make (literally) life and death decisions - just in time for Halloween.

Makes you appreciate and realize both true talent and innovation. This was done with a pretty minimal budget (which Director and co-Writer Lund explains - on this week's [Episode 54] Destroy The Brain podcast - that this project was both a labor of love and self-funded)... but you wouldn't know it! It's smart film-making, and Chris (who is a web designer by day) really delivers a solid, professional, and fun experience rivaling (and in some cases surpassing) that some of his major studio-backed counterparts. The "choose your adventure" is certainly not new (my daughter has several such pulp novellas that read "To walk down the hallway, go to page 64"), but the innovation here is the butterfly affect-like storytelling in combination with the delivery medium. Unlike the linear limitations of a book, delivering such an interactive storyline - one which prompts the user to make choices that may or may not impact the storyline until two or more milestones later - provides us with the potential for unlimited choices and expansion. Well, that is, if you make the right choices!

So, check out Survive the Outbreak and see how you do. Me? I didn't make it quite a few times, but the "been there" milestone-marker "Chapter Select" option really allows you to get back into the game... as long as you remember that a choice you make could impact your survival two or more "chapter" milestones later!