History of Nazi Zombies

[Matuzz]

Early in the World at War development Jesse Synder and Jason McCord were trying to come up with a cool extra to the game like the airplane level on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.  At the time they didn't have anything planned besides a "competitive co-op" similar to the arcade mode of CoD 4 but in co-op.

 

They had planned an end sequence for World at War where you would be playing a German soldier defending a bunker fitted with MG-42 machine guns in the Normandy beach. In the end there would be so many enemies that the player couldn't defend the bunker anymore and U.S soldiers would blast trough the bunker door and in a cinematic a soldier would then shot the player in the head and the game would fade black and end credits would be rolled.

 

Even how cool the idea was there was a problem. Playing as a German got a lot of resistance even though in the end US would "win". In result the idea was ditched. Later during the project they added AI to the level "Little Resistance" which had Japanese soldiers looking dazed after a rockets strike to their defensive structure. Everyone who saw those stumbling animations always mentioned that they looked like zombies.

 

 

Months get passed and one of the producers Dan Bunting came to ask Jesse Synder that they should do as they want some extra content to the game. Jesse still liked the concept of being over run and not really being able to win. One of the common things in Call of Duty has always been the feeling that you are invincible, that when things go wrong you'll be okay in the end.

 

The first thing Jesse asked Dan was if he had ever played tower defense games. He hadn't so Jesse explained him the simple mechanics where after each round you use your points to make your defenses better against next wave of enemies. Repeat that until you die. Tower defense games had always been popular flash games so their own Call of Duty version could be massive hit.

 

The model for the extra content Jesse wanted to follow that of Geometry Wars. "Geometry Wars was a game that started as a mini-game in Project Gotham Racing 2. Eventually, the game became so popular that Bizarre split Geometry Wars out into a separate game, available on Xbox Live. This model for extra game content is ingenious for two major reasons: one, players get a really fun bit of extra content with a high replay value, and two, the development team can use this opportunity to explore and test new ideas and projects. If everything works out, the fans are happy and you have a prototype for another game."

 

After a few hours of talking to Dan about doing extra content Jesse talked to one of the designers, Sean Slayback, about tower defense games and the proposal to make one. He mentioned a game called The Last Stand. It's a flash game where you defend yourself against waves of zombies and buy better guns and defenses.

 

 

Jesse played a few rounds of the game and had a huge epiphany: "Zombie Nazis!" In World at War you could do  many of the same things but it would be much more interactive. Buying barricades in real time and fighting in first person would be very intensive. You could be able to possibly unlock new areas and change strategy and the flow of enemies. And to top it all of you could play in co-op. They already had "zombie" animations from the map Little Resistance" so making a prototype was a no-brainer for Jesse. The engine would support all the needed features and Jesse saw immediately how they could be implemented.

 

Jesse rushed to Dan's office. “Hey, so I have this idea, I think it’s going to be awesome. Let’s do a tower defense game where zombies are attacking a building you're holed up in!” Dan was not sold on the idea. Jesse gave his pitch anyway but Dan wasn't impressed even after he was shown "The Last Stand". Dan said there would be not enough time to make it. Doing such a game would have required all new assets.. It would be huge risk, it wouldn't fit the theme of the game at all and there was no time and the mode would be too "campy". In normal situations the idea would have been put to rest and that would have been it. Jesse still decide to pitch the idea to few of the other devs in the studio. Others seemed to love the idea. Especially the devs who had been playing WoW and StarCraft and knew about the tower defense games fell in love with the idea.

 

Jesse sat on the idea for a while and learned that Dan had grabbed a scripter and a programmer to implement his concept of what a tower defense game should be. The mode was named "Bunker Defense" and included sections of levels from the single player campaign. The player would run trough the levels and guys would be spawn in waves and you'd encounter flame guys and some dogs. The mode however basically lacked all the fundamentals of a tower defense games. You were not defending anything or buying new weapons or upgrades. You would be just running trough the levels in "Bunker Defense" with no strategy.

 

Weeks went by and work got put on the Bunker Defense mode. Jesse kept saying that they should drop the mode and start work on "Zombie Nazis". However he was always met with the same answers: "Too risky," "Too much work", and so on.

 

 

After few months Jesse decided to take things on his own hands and just start making prototype for "Zombie Nazis" himself over a weekend. He took one scary looking Russian building from campaign map and put boards on the outside of it and made some contrast-y lighting. At first he just used the dazed guy animations for locomotion and had them "melee" trough the boards outside of the house in order to make their way in. There was doors you needed to buy open to get a flamethrower and a couch that you could buy away to get into upstairs. There were guns in the walls that you could buy to get into further rounds. The prototype was rough but it had all the core elements.

 

Jesse showed the prototype to a few people and the initial reaction was far better than he expected. Other people could immediately see the potential even though it lacked script work and had temp animations and limited geometry. Most of all the prototype was fun and got positive reactions. The Creative Director Corky Lehmkuhl, gave Jesse the go-ahead to continue work on the mode. Dan wanted to have both his "Bunker Defense" and Jesse's "Nazi Zombies" be in production the same time but after just a week Bunker Defense got cut as it wasn't just working and it had only one programmer, Austin Krauss, assigned to make it work.

 

Despite the potential in the mode. Asutin and Jesse were asked to work on Nazi Zombies on their spare time and on weekends since Treyarch was in full crunch for the main game. Jesse and Austin ended up doing just that and sacrificed their own time to bring Nazi Zombies to the game. Jesse had planned in the prototype to make the boards available to be bought back on the windows but never got that done but Austin made it so you could buy them all back in one shot, and later had it so you would buy them back individually.

 

Treyarch's lead animator at the time Jimmy Zilenski, finally got around to playing the prototype and his head gibbed with excitement. "If you need any animations for this, just let me know." Jesse whipped up a wishlist for different animations and gave it to Jimmy. The animators had a mo-cap session coming up soon, so Jimmy promised to get bunch of zombie animations on the side.

 

By the time the mo-cap session came, one of the luckiest possible things happened. One of the actors they had for the day actually played a zombie at Universal City Walk. So they were working on this side project and just by chance they got one of the best possible actors for the zombie animations. As a result the prototype got million times better.

 

One of the artists, Cameron Petty, wanted to get involved on this side project and wanted to make special characters for Nazi Zombies. He zombied up the SS Honor Guard characters, made glowy eyes for them, and so on. Treyarch had gibbing system set up from the main game, so they got special gibs made just for the zombies. Some of the zombies were also burned in script to give them more gritty and rotten look.

 

 

Eventually a head gibbing was implemented to the zombies. This feature was not in the main game as exploding U.S Marine heads would have been offensive to many but Jesse found a way to make it for zombies all in one script. There was however one bug, sometimes a zombie with out his head would just charge at the players and attack them every now and then. People though it was just awesome and decided not to fix it but add a system that would kill the zombie after a while. So one of the iconic zombie things was originally just a bug.

 

By this time Jesse had moved the level from the Russian house into one of the bunkers from the Pacific campaign. Lead Multiplayer Designer, Chrish Dionne, fixed up a bunch of geometry issues with it and made it not suck so much, Jesse went in and adjusted all the doors and windows so that it fit with the game play better.

 

A few more weeks had passed, and Austina and Jesse were still trying to put everything together on Saturdays and Sundays, even though they were already working on 12+ hours days Monday trough Friday in addition to working on stuff for the main game on the weekends as well. Regardless they were super motivated to work on Nazi Zombies.

 

Jesse had also idea for "Magic Chest" during the prototype phase but never got time to implement it. It wasn't until they got the mode moved to the new bunker map that Jesse started working on new interactive objects like the rifle cabinet, the treasure box and so on. Jesse knew in order to keep the game interesting there needed to be some randomness as well as strategy. People loved going to the box and seeing what weapons they would get.

 

The chalk outlines used to buy weapons of the wall were added to the game much later. Jesse had always wanted chalk outlines since day one. He imaged it like in the Hitman series where there is outlines for weapons in your hideout and as you progress they start showing up.

 

 

Once Lead Artist, Brian Anderson, started playing some Zombies, he whipped up the chalk outlines, re-did the lighting and generally made it look pretty. He also fixed up the box with question marks on it, which was a nice polish touch.

 

So by now on their spare time they had a full functional and fun prototype of the mode with rounds and all made up. It had actual zombie animations, near complete geometry, lighting and a prototype intro screen and so on.

 

However, at this point the mode was still very buggy and unbalanced. First round would last like 30 zombies and it was very slow. Jesse and Austin hadn't had a day off for months. They hit the point where they couldn't work on the mode anymore as the main game took too much attention. There were multiple times they though the mode would be cut off because lack of manpower including when Austin was pulled of to work elsewhere in the game.

 

The upper management however decided to put Lead Scripter, Mike Denny, as fully dedicated on Nazi Zombies, which it was now officially called. He fixed up a lot of remaining issues, polished up a lot of features for example the couch which would just disappear would now fly up in the air with FX. They and Jimmy and another animator, Phillip Lozano, went back and fourth and played ton of the game mode every night balancing it on the fly to make sure Nazi Zombies played right. Early you could get to round 35+ with ease. They wanted 10 to be the tipping point, with 20 being the point at which if anyone makes a mistake the game ends.

 

With only a week or two before submission, Jesse was satisfied with the game play but there was still something missing. Power-ups! Jesse was heavily advised against it, but as the creator of the mode he decided to go ahead and add four power-ups in a "day of mad scripting". At first he just grabbed what ever models he could find that were kooky enough to be power-up models. Point doubler was a tea kettle, the Insta-Kill was a crow model, Max Ammo was a rat and the bomb was... well, a bomb.

 

Some people hated the drops at first. They had been playing a lot of Nazi Zombies, and thought it took away from the "survival horror aspect" of the game. But that wasn't the direction they were going with the Nazi Zombies anyway. Most fun part of Nazi Zombies was to play with friends and see how far you could go. While the atmosphere is somewhat freaky, the game isn't meant to be a serious survival horror game. It's meant to be more arcadey and fun.

 

After the power-ups made it into the game you could hear all around the office: "Get the bird, oh tea kettle double points!". At this point in the project the team was mainly bug fixing and content was locked so everywhere you went in the office you'd see people playing Nazi Zombies. You could hear them across the office, yelling at each other for revives, talking trash about how far they had made it and what strategies they had used. Nazi Zombies became the buzz around the office and people especially loved the Ray Gun.

 

The Ray Gun is another awesome, semi-accident that fit perfectly with Nazi Zombies. One of the weapon artist, Max Porter, did the Ray Gun as total fun, side project for himself. One day he walked by Jesse and said "Hey, want to see something cool?" That was pretty unlike him, so he brings Jesse over his desk and shows the Ray Gun model in first person. It was pretty finished minus the animations.

 

The Zombies had only been guys in olive green running around with WWII weaponry so Ray Gun looked awesome addition. Audio Director, Brian Tuey, was also amazed b the gun and said he'd do the sound for it. Particle FX Lead, Barry Whitney, said he'd do custom particles and Jimmy said he'd do animations for the gun. After all was done the Ray Gun became the ultimate Nazi Zombie killer.

 

Meanwhile, Denny was still working full time on Nazi Zombies and adding ton of polish to the power-ups for example making the guys heads gib on insta-kill, catch zombies on fire when the bomb goes off and so on. Brian eventually make new shiny gold models you see today for the power-ups.

 

Kevin Sherwood wrote riff that plays in the mode when the camera fly trough the environment as a quick fix to the mode. Brian Tuey liked it so much that he challenged Kevin Sherwood to make it into a full song that would be played after the players die in the map. So Kevin was playing guitar and Elene Siegman was doing vocal for the song that was completely produced inside Treyarch Studio's. The song became known as "Lullaby of a Dead Man". The sound team also added a radio to the map that played random songs from the campaign maps when it was damaged.

 

Jesse could see that Nazi Zombies would become an even bigger hit when people in the office started playing and making competitions. Almost everyone around the office were playing the game and sending emails with screenshots of their highest rounds. As result on of the programmers added leaderboards for the mode. Denny kept polishing the game and fixing bugs and exploits people found out. For example people were going down on purpose with the Ray Guns as that gave their full ammo when they were revived.

 

After what seemed almost impossible task during a very strict development of the biggest game in the industry by a chance and luck Nazi Zombies were created. After Jesse Synder got people behind his idea the mode grew into a passion project for the whole team.

 

The Nazi Zombies also became an instant fan success and fans became a very big part of the future development process of the zombies. Treyarch uses many of the ideas that fans have come up with in addition to their own to push the zombies forward and make each map better than the previous while trying to keep the mode fun and true to it's core gameplay that Jesse designed. One of the additions of fans was how they heard one of the zombies screaming "Sam!" so Treyarch tied that to the game by making a character called Samanta Maxis.

 

The zombies team had free hands on the development of the mode and the mode became also a platform for Treyarch to test different things that they wouldn't want to risk in the main game. This included voiced playable characters in Verruckt which paved a way for Black Ops single player campaign having voice for the main character. Also first playable female character in Call of Duty was introduced in Call of the Dead.

 

Voices added to the characters was also the first step in creating backstory for the Nazi Zombies mode in Verruckt. In Shi No Numa four very stereotypical characters were added to the game so players would not have trouble understanding who they are playing with, as zombies didn't have any cut-scenes to introduce the players to the story or characters.

 

The man behind the idea of Nazi Zombies Jesse Synder left Treyarch during the pre-production of Black Ops, and is now working in Infinity Ward his latest game being CoD: Ghosts. After being massive success in World at War zombies became the essential part of Treyarch games and with Black Ops many developers were dedicated for zombies. Previosly Lead Animator, Jimmy Zilenski, became Creative/Desing Director of Call of Duty Zombies and Reza Elghazi, Zombies Producer.

 

Idea for the zombies map "FIVE" came from Dave Anthony, Director and writer, he got the idea for a map set inside a Pentagon while being on treadmill on morning. He squirreled the idea away on his iPhone for later.

 

Months later he was brainstorming with Corky Lehmkuhl, Creative Director, about using the Pentagon as the setting for the co-op mode in Black Ops, where the players would be playing with political figures. Anthony later noticed his boss Mark Lamia reacting to the idea with concern. Anthony said: "I call it the Rule of Fear," "If I'm pitching an idea to somebody with any sort of authority and influence on the things we can do, and they look scared, I know I'm on to something." The idea was later approved and players could kill zombies as, JFK, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara.

 

Jimmy Zilenski wanted "FIVE" to be sort of a new Nacht Der Untoten where they would now use assets they never had during the development of the first map. That's why the map has a lot of dead ends and very narrow hallways.

 

 

If Zombies mode hadn't shown how big of a success it was for Treyarch and Activision with World at War then Black Ops'  final DLC, a zombies only DLC called Rezurrection did it as it became the most sold DLC pack in the history of Call of Duty showing that zombies is just as big as single player and multi player are.

 

After the Black Ops II Jason Blundel took Jimmy Zilenski's place as the Director, Campaing & Zombies / Sr. Executive Producer. He has already worked as director for some zombies maps like Call of the Dead and Mob of the Dead, It's unknown as of yet if also Jimmy has completely left Treyarch like Jesse did from the original minds behind the Zombies mode.

SOURCES: 

Spoiler

Sources:

http://www.jessesnyder.org/trenches/?p=42

http://briantuey.blogspot.fi/2008/12/world-at-war-nazi-zombies.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703727804576017750949649880

http://www.treyarch.com/about

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worth the watch:

 

 

 

[Lenne]

Sick stuff, @Matuzz .

Here I thought I already knew everything of the early developement.

Thanks a lot. :3

[Matuzz]

Glad you liked it! It really is as interesting story as the one in the game

[anonymous]

Really cool to see how CoDZ became what it noe is.

One question: What happened with Jesse Synder?

[NaBrZHunter]

Can't believe I overlooked this for so long! Excellent work, archiving this story. Will recommend for pinning.

[Matuzz]

On 14.2.2016 at 9:39 PM, anonymous said:

Really cool to see how CoDZ became what it noe is.

One question: What happened with Jesse Synder?

He moved to work for 343 Industries and was lead designer for Halo 4. Currently he is working at Infinity Ward.

 

On 15.2.2016 at 8:16 PM, NaBrZHunter said:

Can't believe I overlooked this for so long! Excellent work, archiving this story. Will recommend for pinning.

Thanks! :)

[Matuzz]

Fixed typos and added two cool videos that are worth to watch to the end of the post.

[anonymous]

Thanks for adding the videos