This rebel’s cause: to revive a moribund genre by bringing a dead man back to life. But what did Wideload Games’ zom-com actually achieve?

Alexander Seropian, president of Wideload Games, is living proof that rebellion is the ultimate product of experience. The more you learn, the more you’ll ask. The more you build, the more you’ll want undone. The more you impose order on the bits and pieces of your profession, the more you’ll relish chaos. And Seropian had learned and built so much when he fell in love with zombies.

There was Bungie, the studio (and community) he’d started, sold and left behind. There was Wideload, which he founded in 2003. There was Halo: Combat Evolved, the heroic FPS which saved, among other things, the reputation of Xbox. There were console games and computer games. Strategies and shooters. Acolytes and awards. All the things a development CV could want. All leading to Stubbs.

The highest of many concepts tossed around Wideload’s tiny staff – only 11 worked there then, only 20 do now – Stubbs The Zombie is a precious rarity: a use of power for something other than consolidating power. It’s a brave twist on a rigid genre. A dangerous experiment. A deliberate breakdown of natural law. “When dead men start crawling from their graves and gobbling the flesh of the living,” remarked Seropian in one interview, “you have to consider the possibility that everything you knew is worthless.”

Ostensibly, of course, it’s little more than a game about coping with the enormous bother of being recently undead. In action terms, having your guns, bombs and superhuman powers replaced by guts, bowels and suffocating flatulence. It’s about exercising the right to bear arms, just so long as they’re torn from the shoulder. About bowling your head when all about you are losing theirs. About getting an army of halfwits, with a shove here and a wolf-whistle there, to do the job of one capable man.

But at heart it’s about something more subversive than a simple change of tools. It’s about learning to lose – and love it. Enter Edward ‘Stubbs’ Stubblefield, a guy who thought the ideal time to be a traveling salesman was in the midst of the Great Depression. Who couldn’t even die correctly, but can at least smoke a cigarette without it ever going out. He’s a pitiful creature, with a shotgun wound for a waist but, like Master Chief, blessed with an unerring sense of purpose. Not a mission, maybe, but an impulse, to eat brains, put one foot in front of the other, and give some flowers to the love of his former life – the buxom farmhand whose affections got him murdered in the first place.

Before you even get to his main objective – sacking Punchbowl, the retro-futuristic metropolis built upon his grave – Stubbs himself is a challenge. Which is, of course, the idea. He’s unfashionable, and not just because his ’30s attire is in similar condition to his flesh. He’s uncomfortable, neither lithe assassin nor tactile warrior. He’s not a bully, like Dead Rising’s Frank West. Nor is he the classic mutant, whose afflictions grant an inexplicable military knowhow. He’s a loser. A victim. The guy on the other end of the joke.

For the story of a man who cannot speak, Stubbs features a remarkable 12,000 lines of recorded dialogue, all played for laughs, many reserved for when you cock something up. The best thing about his possessive hand, for instance, which seizes control of gun-toting enemies, is when it plops from the sky after a botched attack and is accused, by one of Punchbowl’s simpler folk, of being a communist.

Heroes with flaws are nothing new to gaming: Lucasarts, during its ’90s heyday, built a reputation on them; Capcom, in a slightly different manner, likes to mix innate clumsiness with airs of sophistication (PN03, for example). But seldom does a klutz like Stubbs manage to influence so much of the game around him. True to its premise from top to toe, his is very much a case of zombie by name, zombie by nature.

He gets from A to B with help from almost no signposting whatsoever, and from level to level by means of some truly preposterous acts of God. Freak explosions send him flying over locked gates; an ill-fated sheep gives him a ride to Punchbowl’s factory district where, in the absence of a nearby toilet, he ‘contaminates’ the city’s entire water supply.