Instead, the mall is designed around your experience as the player. The film’s ultimate enemy is the shopping mall itself, capable of both saving and hurting people in the same way malls both saved and hurt smaller communities throughout the US.ĭead Rising’s Willamette Mall is just as intentionally dull and blah as Dawn’78’s but it’s for a very different reason. It wears down whoever’s inside it into mindless cultists obsessed with buying stuff – i.e. In Dawn of the Dead, the shopping mall is just an empty conglomerate of vapid storefronts. It’s like if a mannequin was a building – which is sort of the point. The generic stores, the pastel colours, the carousel music blaring through the tinny loudspeakers: it lacks any sort of personality or character. The original Dawn of the Dead was filmed in the 70s and, more than anywhere else, this shows in its sterile and garish shopping mall. (SPOILERS AHEAD for Dead Rising and both the original Dawn of the Dead and its remake.) …Yes, this is definitely an excuse to rave about Dead Rising for a while. It gamifies zombie tropes, pays spirited homage to the Romero legacy with a touch of satire and parody in its own right, takes some junk from the 2004 remake, and ties it all together with that campy Capcom style. It pulls out from well-trod zombie canon – survivalism, helpless strangers, social roles, conspiracies, violence, insanity, cults – and stirs it all into the ultimate zombie survival pseudo-sim. It’s more than just a copycat: Capcom breaks the original film down and crafts something new from the pieces. I mean, they’re so similar that Capcom was even sued over it ( unsuccessfully).Īs an adaptation, though, Dead Rising is smarter (and better) than most. It’s a zombie survival game set in a tacky mall in the American Midwest – the only way you could miss the connection is if you’ve never heard of the film or the remake. When you break it down, Dead Rising is just a bootleg tie-in game for George A.
If you have a suggestion or think we missed something, let us know on the socials or in the comments below! In Press X To Adapt, we dive into a game-turned-movie or movie-turned-game to see how it turned out, how the two compare, and anything else worth chatting about.