How Did HvZ Start Anyway?
By Adam Longwill
Humans Versus Zombies, the sometimes beloved, sometimes vilified game of moderated tag now played in multiple countries across the globe, had humble beginnings at the small liberal arts school Goucher College. But it would be inaccurate to state that the game was born out of thin air. It wasn’t. This is the story of its little known precursor.
Chris Weed sat in his darkened living room with a hookah on the coffee table and melody-shunning songs on his stereo, occasionally punctuated by gangster rap. Chris is the Chief Managing Member of HvZSource, the company that runs HumansVsZombies.org and hosts the free tracking of games around the world to assist play. He is also a co-founder of the game itself, along with Brad Sappington who is still regularly involved in the project. When asked how he came up with the game, he started by making an admission.
“Part of the reason we came up with the game was to use the Nerf guns we bought for cheap because Toys’R’Us was closing.” He said, his eyes wandering around in the room. But the game was inspired by more than that. “Brad and I had been playing Splinter Cell the past few nights.” Chris said, referring to the Tom Clancy spy game with an emphasis on using stealth to sneak up behind and Assassinsate targets. “So we thought ‘what about a game of Assassins where you have to sneak up on people—you can’t shoot people if they know you’re there.”
Assassins, to those not in the know, is a game often played at high schools or colleges where a set group of players is given the name of one other player in secret and it is up to each person to secretly hunt down and ‘Assassinsate’ their target. While the rules differ, the result is a constant state of paranoia and usually a neck-ache from constantly looking over ones shoulder. It is lauded as one of the most fun live-action games you can play.
And the Nerf blaster wars they were playing were getting old. After all, it’s fun to surprise your friends with a hail of foam bullets for only so long. Although they had both played Assassins before, the idea left them with the question of how to integrate their Nerf arsenal. In a recent phone interview, Brad Sappington explained “We said ‘we need to do something better than sneak up and shoot your friends—we need to get points for it.”
And so Assassinate Your Friends was born. “What about a game like Assassins where you sneak up on people?” Chris said, recalling his brainstorming “Like, you can’t shoot someone if they know you’re there.” The result was a firestorm of interest from their friends in their dormitory hallway. The game was small: only about seventeen players, usually in teams of two. Chris and Brad set out to emulate their favorite video game in real life. Well, sort of. “We found ourselves sneaking around corners and trying to put our hands around people’s faces.” Brad laughed, over the phone. “But simulating breaking necks and breaking necks are very similar so we decided it’s not something you can do.”
In the end, they added more rules to make Assassinsate Your Friends like a real-life video game. Each player on a team of two had three lives. Lives could be shared between players on a team. There were no safe zones—not even your own room was safe. But you could only be shot or stabbed (with a finger) if you didn’t know your attacker was there.
The stories of that small game still bring flashes of excitement to the eyes of those who tell them. “I saw too much” Said Cassie Brand, one of the players. “[A bunch of guys] teamed up against me. I was watching a movie in the common room, getting a massage, and they thought I was actually watching the movie, but I was watching their reflection in a window. I see Alex [a player, in that reflection] and turn around and shoot him. I hear a girly scream in the hall.” There was an ambush set up for her, among them Chris Weed. They could not understand how she had spotted their assassin. So they called for a temporary truce.
Little did she know one of her attackers had sent a text message to a player who was not present and so had not agreed to the truce. “So Evan [another player] comes behind me, but I’m watching the reflections again and turned and shot him and they all freaked out again.” Her sixth sense became legendary and they began calling her “the ninja.” “Chris Weed spent two hours in my closet waiting to kill me.” She admitted. While the game was supposed to end with one clear victor, the remaining players, after agreeing to work together to eliminate Cassie, agreed to a five-way tie after her eventual assassination.
While stealth was the emphasis of the game, it also became its downfall. “The big hole in our game was how to prove we knew our attacker was there” Said Chris. “So we made this dumb-ass rule that you had to put three fingers on your forehead—and that’s how you knew someone was around… and so you were safe.” Explained Brad. But it did not go quite as they planned. “That turned into everyone walking around like a complete idiot with their hands on their foreheads.” Essentially, everyone was constantly immune to being tagged. “You could only carry your books to class in one hand because your other hand was on your forehead.” Brad laughed.
Assassinate Your Friends took about a week to play and was unexpectedly intense. “No one was expecting Cassie to be really hardcore.” Chris Weed said of “the ninja,” reminiscing. You might think a game that inspired such dedication and enthusiasm would be remembered as a smashing success. But you would be wrong if you did.
“Assassinate Your Friends was a flop.” Admitted Brad. “There were too many rules and not enough people were interested.” Chris echoed these thoughts. “Everyone was angry about the three fingers rule. It was a fun idea but I think people would have had more fun playing regular Assassins. And so the game was partly an excuse to bring our Nerf guns to class.” And so, only a few days after the excitement of their stealthy game began, Assassinate Your Friends ended with players grumbling.
Little did Chris and Brad know, word had gotten out about their game on campus. At the time of the interviews, neither had realized the extent of the popularity of their game. In fact, no less than three separate instances of the game were attempted by others in the weeks following the running of Assassinate Your Friends. One used balled up socks, another attempted to play it with squirt guns. These versions spawned more interest in playing a constant live-action campus-wide game. When it was explained to them, their responses were similar. “No, I had no idea,” admitted Brad. Without their knowing it, the stage had been set for something bigger.
The pair were frustrated that their original game was not the success they imagined. “I can’t think of the exact time where we decided to make a new game. We just kind of started writing rules, modifying the Assassinate Your Friends rules, trying to make them simpler.”
When they went back to revise the rules, they also looked for a new spin on the game. “I think it was Chris Collins who asked ‘what about zombies’?” Chris Weed said of a friend. They ran with it. Chris explained that he really never liked the idea of stagnant teams where players were simply pitted against one another. He came up with the idea of having players switch sides instead of being removed from the game after being killed. The mythology of the zombie fit in well with that idea with players only becoming a zombie after being “infected.” In fact, he realized, you really only need a single original zombie to start off the chain reaction of zombie players infecting human ones. The simplicity was brilliant. They decided the original zombie’s identity should be kept a secret. Chris and Brad set to work tailoring their new game, adding rules, and ensuring this version of tag would be more streamlined than their previous attempt—and it had to contain Nerf blasters, too, of course.
When it came to marketing this new version, however, there seemed to be little interest.
“When we were doing Assassinate Your Friends, we had to struggle to get anyone to play.” Explained Brad. “It started off pretty slow. Not too many people showed interest in Humans Versus Zombies at first—we had to cram it down a bunch of people’s throats.” But due to the climate of excitement created by the pair with Assassinate Your Friends, word was spreading like wildfire. As the sign-up deadline loomed, the number of registered players swelled from only a handful of their friends to nearly seventy players from dorms all over campus.
“I don’t know where it all came from,” Admitted Brad. “One week it just… took off.” Neither of them expected the response they got and were completely unprepared for the work that would eventually be required of them once the game started. During that first game, there was no automatic tracking software set up to identify humans and zombies. It was all done by hand.
The rest, of course, is history. When Steve Pingel, the very first Original Zombie was asked what he thought about the game’s success in a recent interview, he said he was “pleasantly surprised that it was Goucher that got all this started, that it was also about zombies, and that it became this viral thing.” He paused. “No pun intended.”
Sometimes, even the smallest idea of a way to pass the time with friends can turn into a smashing success. Neither Brad Sappington nor Chris Weed expected the mania it would inspire. Brad described the moment he knew they were on to something big after registration for the second game ended. “The excitement of the first game had spread. When I saw the number [of players] double by the second game—that blew my mind.”
And it all seemed to come out of nowhere. The players might believe that it was all planned from the start, and that success was guaranteed from such an insidiously simple game design, but this was not the case. It would be nearly impossible to get such a balanced game design right in only one attempt. For Chris and Brad, it took at least two.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Content.
