Characters from The Walking Dead TV series are to star in The Walking Dead Video Game, a 2013 first-person shooter in development for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The show's Daryl and Merle Dixon will be installed as the game's main haracters, traveling through Georgia and towards safety in Atlanta.
Though the first-person shooter genre might be more commonly associated with all-action war games such as Call of Duty or Battlefield, this take on The Walking Dead requires a stealthier approach in order to survive the dangers of a zombie apocaplyse.
"The player's fight-or-flight survival instinct is constantly engaged. 'Flight' is usually a good bet," said creative director Drew Haworth in a press statement.
His company, Terminal Reality, most recently developed Kinect Star Wars and Ghostbusters: The Video Game.
In addition, the series's menacing Walkers will be rendered especially sensitive to sound and smell, factors that require the Merle brothers to stay alert and stay on the move.
Angel Gonzalez, creative lead, told the PlayStation Blog that "you'll need to carefully sneak into and out of some dangerous situations and you may meet a few Walkers along the way. If you show up with guns blazing, you'll quickly find yourself dealing with a much larger crowd and you could easily become overwhelmed."
The Walking Dead Video Game will be the second official game, but the first to be based on the TV show rather than the comic book series.
Its predecessor, Telltale Games' ongoing season of The Walking Dead adventures, is available as an iOS, Mac, PC, PS3 and 360 download, with the third of five episodes due August and a disc-based edition promised for North America at least.
Terminal Reality's project enters a market where engaging, first-person, zombie-themed shooters are plentiful: Left 4 Dead 2, Arma II's popular free Day Z mod, and Call of Duty's staple Zombies mode among them. Resident Evil 6, whose forebears had used a third-person perspective to great effect, marks the return of a genre-defining franchise on October 2, while ZombieU is expected to launch alongside the WiiU late 2012.
PlayStation Blog post: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/07/09/the-walking-dead-video-game-stealth-and-scent/
Official website: thewalkingdeadbegins.com
