Whether they terrorize us and make us shiver under the blankets or they just make us laugh hysterically until we cry, zombies will always remain a great source of entertainment. Apparently video games industry veteran Jeff Strain feels the same way, as he has recently announced the formation of Undead Labs, a game development studio based in Seattle that will focus on online games. But not any kind of online games, but the definitive massively multiplayer online zombie game (MMOZ). So double undead trouble!

Strain left NCSoft last summer (we hear a roar of applauses in the background) with the declared goal of building from the ground up, together with a few of the most talented developers, a creative studio that targets a new breed of MMO for console gamers. “Every time I see a good zombie movie with friends, we spend days debating our strategies for surviving the zombie apocalypse,” said Strain. “The police station or the supermarket? Garden rake or staple gun? Bach or The White Stripes? I’m a game developer, so I’d probably be useless for anything other than ghoul bait, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to build an MMOZ that lets us put those strategies to the test and find out for sure.”

Strain’s game developing experience doesn’t come short of impressive. At Blizzard Entertainment he was a programmer for StarCraft and Diablo, and he created the StarCraft campaign editor. Assuming the role of team leader and lead programmer, he also formed the core team that kicked off the development of World of Warcraft, the most popular MMO of all times – I didn’t say the best MMO, mind you. In April 2000, together with fellow leads Mike O’Brien and Patrick Wyatt, Strain founded ArenaNet, the company that developed Guild War, for which Strain was a programmer and executive producer. ArenaNet was to be acquired in 2002 by NCSoft. Here he was promoted in 2008 to the position of President of Product Development for the company’s western operations, position he occupied for a year before deciding that freedom among zombies seems more appealing than the corporate stuck-up fashion and policies.

Hoping they will not end up tearing each other to pieces in a zombie fashion, we wish Undead Labs the best of luck and hope to hear more from them soon. For more info you can visit Undead Labs’ official site.

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