The Reckoning

by Ed Anderson

First a little background. Survivor Z was released in Fall of 2014, and for almost six years, players have been strategizing, competing, and killing for their digital lives in the first text-based multiplayer online role-playing game. Survivor Z was an evolution of Ed Anderson’s original game “ZDAY Survival Simulator” which was a very well-received release on the iTunes Store in Spring of 2012.

Now, on to this idea of the reckoning. What players may know about Survivor Z is that it keeps track of your decisions, and it presents gameplay options based on the choices you make. What many of them may not understand, is to what a degree some of these decisions are being tracked and recorded. The intention in the case of Survivor Z was always to come to some kind of conclusion about every player, and at that point give them some kind of resolution. When I first starting writing for Survivor Z after writing Simulator the first thing I realized was that there was almost no limit to how much content I could produce for this game, and that really other than thematic limitations there was no limit other than my own ability to avoid burning out writing zombie-themed game content. So I realized that I needed at some point to let players know that they were being watched the whole time, and that every choice of consequence that they made was recorded, and that someday there would be an omnipresent being come down from the clouds and give them all their day of reckoning based on all the things that they had done, good, bad and ugly. Tracking these invisible decision “tokens” is easy, but we also have all the other data to go with it to give us a complete picture. For example, I can look at everything a player owns, what challenges he or she has completed, what special items they have collected, how they have treated various NPCs along the way and a myriad of other virtual breadcrumbs that they have left that paints a very nuanced picture of where they are in the Survivor Z Universe.

So the next phase in the Survival Z Series is likely the most important one. Several new challenges that will take into account all the player’s previous choices and give them each an outcome that is unique to their experience. I hope that all players will accept these challenges, it will give them a great sense of closure, and may even make them want to start over and play all over again. The first of these special release challenges will be released soon, so keep watching our website, Twitter, and Facebook for updates.