STACK NZ Dec #80

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What has the fan response been like so far, especially considering it’s been 10 years since the original came out? JOE NICKOLLS: It’s been super positive. I think they like the fact that it’s been ten years since the original one launched and they really like Frank - they like to be Frank, they like the fact that the game is Christmas time, and it’s in Colorado and there’s snow. It’s been really well received.

What is it about the Dead Rising franchise that has allowed it to stay relevant and popular for so long? It’s funny - video games go through this journey, where a

myself (he laughs) and we thought, ‘how are we going to do that?’ So we had the mech suit that you could build upon - and we thought that might be really fun. The mech suit does a couple of things. It punches cars, rips parking meters out of the ground, and picks up huge objects you couldn’t normally pick up without it. The other thing you do, is you then combo that. So you can go up to a slushie machine that makes frozen drinks and you combo that with your suit, which of course is the first thing anybody would do, and you make this ridiculous weapon that shoots ice tornados and ice pellets and icicle bombs. It’s crazy. So where can we expect to see the next one set? Down Under? Yeah. We should make one in Australia. Dead Rising Down Under, that would be fun. That’s the thing that’s amazing about Dead Rising, because if it feels kind of dumb and kind of, I don’t want to say stereotypical, but oh my God, if we had a Dead Rising in Australia, we would be all over that. We’d even find a way to get Hugh Jackman to work with that. How have the zombies changed? We’ve always had the regular horde - I just call them a herd of cows. They’re not too terrifying, they’re slow moving and you can mow them down like bowling pins. But what we wanted to do with that is

add a little bit more challenge, so we have something we call the freshly infected. What that does, that’s a person that’s just been bit by a zombie, and they run around all crazy, like 28 Days Later . They’re fast, they’re crazy, they run at you. If they bite you, you know it’s game over. They’re very difficult to avoid - if you climb on a car to get away, they’ll just climb up the car after you. And, the way that the law works, if a zombie is a freshly-infected bitten one, one of two things happen. They either snap and they just become one of the mindless horde and they’re not a threat anymore, or they push through it. What that means is they become an evo. They become kind of sentient, they become pretty smart. They’re about five per cent human still, and they still have a bit of capacity to make logical decisions. They know they’re a zombie but they use tactics to get to you. Kind of like the raptors in Jurassic Park . They will hurt you. They will wear you down, and come in and finish you off. So there are three different levels of zombies. You’ve got a new voice actor on board for Dead Rising 4’ s FrankWest, is that right? We did an open casting call. We had all the original voices from Dead Rising. We had all the stuff that we done in the past, and we had all these audio clips with video, and then we had all the people that auditioned for new stuff, and we really

game comes out and people play them, and they go, ‘that’s really cool’ and then it’s ten years later and you look back at the original game and go, ‘oh my god, that was horrible’ because technology in games has grown so much. I really like how the series has been evolving. I like how our character’s more relevant now. I like the fact that the new Xbox console makes things look better. More stuff on the screen. You need to invest in a brand; we think it’s important that we put effort into Dead Rising, because it’s going to be around for a very long time. It will evolve and grow throughout the years. People have got a relationship with Dead Rising, and everyone has a different one, and it’s up to us to make sure that we make a good brand for people to embrace. What do you think is at the core of a Dead Rising game? When we first started making the game, it was all about combo weapons and combo vehicles. That’s been one of the hallmarks of the game - putting things together with duct tape, and things that shouldn’t work together do work together. When you’ve got all these weapons and gadgets, you end up wondering ‘what’s the next thing we could do?’ We came up with the idea, maybe I can just combo

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