Though we never meet another team of survivors in the game, these rooms are frequented by others, as we can see from the abundance of writing on the walls. These are zombie-proof rooms stocked with supplies such as first aid kits and ammunition. As survivors head toward the evacuation point, they stop in what are called “safe rooms” or “safe houses” (Valve Corporation). Stories in Left 4 Dead appear throughout the game in the form of graffiti. “Blood Harvest” Escape Sequence (Valve Corporation)Īside from its hopeful conclusion, Left 4 Dead relies on storytelling to uphold the view that the apocalypse will end.
These visual and auditory signs tell the player that the story is moving on to a hopeful future.įig. If one or more of the survivors perish before they reach the escape vehicle, a memorial message comes up on the screen, offering consolation but hope. The words “The survivors have escaped!” appear, and heroic music swells (see Fig. In “Blood Harvest,” we even get a glimpse of the sunrise before the screen fades to black. There is no mention of what might come after this rescue, but it is hopeful. Assuming they can hold off waves of the undead, the survivors are rescued by a civilian or military vehicle. The locations of these end-points range from urban (the rooftop of a city hospital) to rural (an abandoned farmhouse). The game has four independent campaigns, “No Mercy,” “Death Toll,” “Dead Air,” and “Blood Harvest,” that each trace the survivors’ progression towards an evacuation point. It is a First-Person Shooter (FPS) survival horror game the story, such as it is, finds four strangers travelling together two weeks after the zombie infection started spreading (Valve Corporation). Released into the horde of all things zombie in 2008, Valve’s videogame Left 4 Dead carries with it the tendency of post-apocalyptic fiction to look ahead - in this case to a time when humanity will eradicate the zombie threat. My discussion will conclude that although typical post-apocalyptic zombie fiction like Left 4 Dead is more uplifting, the bleaker vision of Zone One is a more realistic, Anthropocenic narrative of the end of the world. At this point, I will shift my discussion to Zone One, highlighting the ways the novel’s embedded stories also uphold this hope for the future, but demonstrating that the novel ultimately resists this reading. I will begin by discussing embedded stories in Left 4 Dead that present this belief, before moving on to how the larger environmental narrative justifies the violence required to guarantee humanity’s survival. The goal of my discussion here is to examine this paradoxical belief in the end of the end of the world as it manifests in storytelling in two works of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, a videogame entitled Left 4 Dead and Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One.
#SELF COMPOSED SAFEROOM LOADING SONG L4D SERIES#
Max Brooks’s World War Z, written as a series of stories reflecting upon the zombie apocalypse, offers this perspective as well, “assur the reader that the apocalyptic scenario that it describes will not only end but also become knowable as an event that can be subsumed into human history” (Sorensen 567).
As the American Phoenix project heads would say, humanity must merely survive the “interregnum” (Whitehead 54). These stories literally embody the belief that human survivors can get through the end of the world intact, believing that “the apocalypse is an object on which humanity can act, not an irresistible force that acts on humanity” (Sorensen 566). Zombie narratives are excellent examples of post-apocalyptic fiction’s resistance to closure. In this scenario, the apocalypse is a temporary setback, an event that humans can conquer and recover from in this scenario, the return to normalcy is inevitable. It allows humankind to make a fresh start” (Lovegrove 99). The narrative, then, sees the “apocalypse a disaster but also an opportunity. Even though the memoir ends, it continually hopes to be read anew, subscribing to the “oxymoronic premise that the apocalypse has a future” (Sorensen 563). As such, it projects itself into the future “for the benefit of posterity (not that anyone remains to read it)” (Lovegrove 99). Shelley’s novel is written as a memoir and claims to be a translation of ancient writings (Lovegrove 99). Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826, was “the first major work of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction” (Lovegrove 98). Storytelling is the main method by which post-apocalyptic fiction attempts to resist closure, and this method can be traced back to the roots of the genre itself. Post-apocalyptic fiction continually attempts to project itself into the future by resisting endings each ending becomes instead an opportunity for continuation.
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