GameClub: Zombie Nation

In the eighties and early nineties video games were a hotbed for playground rumors and parental hysteria.

Ill informed presumptions were not yet furnished with "alternative fact" status, giving way to the imaginative uncertainties that come with good old fashioned ignorance. Some were excited by the occult possibility of new gaming frontiers, while others cringed with bubbling anxiety that Nintendo might be harbingers for dangerous, weird, and generally demonic gaming experiences.

More often than not, hopes and fears were unfounded in equal measure. Technology was simply too limited to ever really fulfill anyone's nightmarish vision of childhood corruption. The worst you could usually expect was miserable, barely functioning exploitation of a well known brand, or license.

Then there's Zombie Nation: a 1990 Japanese NES title developed by KAZe. and released locally by Meldac under the title Abarenbou Tengu.

I'm led to believe the translation is something like Rampage Tengu, but it hardly matters, because when the game arrived in the United States at the dawn of 1991, the demonic tengu mask players control was replaced with the decapitated head of a samurai. As you can imagine, that necessitated a few tweaks to the plot, which apparently revolves around a sentient meteor turning citizens of the United States into zombies in the year 1999, and taking possession of a sacred sword.

The decapitated head of Namakubi hears about this ugly turn of events and floats on over to America to lay waste to the zombie nation by puking lava all over it. Or something. Who can really care about details when you're drinking in the splendor of nuclear neon red-orange skies, crumbling buildings, a giant samurai head gobbling doomed zombies, and whatever ever other horrors this game unleashes?

Zombie Nation is quite simply everything I could've hoped for when I was imagining garish, forbidden video games in 1990. It actually is one of those bizarre, awful games you heard about. Made all the more unlikely by the American version being more bizarre than Japan's!

Zombie Nation is to games as Hausu is to movies. An overstuffed fever-dream of unexpected and unfathomable creative choices -- with a malicious decapitated head!

This game takes me right back to the deli at the top of the hill in the middle of a long stretch of road I was too young to be asked to walk. To a time of dehydration, when my mind wandered and I spotted a friend, or sign, and wondered what strange and taboo games were out there. Only I'm not filled with dread, or anxiety, as my parents probably were. I'm filled with hope. Because if a game like this can exist, maybe there's a chance something weird and wonderful could happen again!