Can Zombies Help Save a City?

We all know zombies are shambling, mindless, chemical/virus pumped up reanimated corpses driven by a need to eat all the squishy bits off of you and your family. But zombies working for the public good?
That’s exactly what a geeky entrepreneur named Mark Siwak is trying to do in the Motor City. Mr. Siwak and the Z World Detroit team have started up an Idiegogo campaign to open up a zombie themed experience park on 200 acres of the cities abandoned and dilapidated warehouse district and surrounding abandoned neighborhoods.
The idea is to have a post-apocalyptic space where visitors and a couple hundred of their friends and complete strangers, can spend a night running away from the shambling undead, finding supplies, and generally surviving until daylight. The campaign, while admittedly could use some help in the illustration area, is pretty well thought out. While at first mention this sounds like it should end up on the ‘wtf?’ scale these guys have looked at a lot of angles on this and if they can get the funding, might just be able to pull it off. I’m a little skeptical about the patch system and think that might need to get rethought because if patches equal my life I will be defending them, ahem, strenuously. But also do zombies now have the pull to sustain a long term project like this?
Would I try spending a night in Z World Detroit? Heck yeah! So hopefully these guys get their campaign funded and sometime soon we can all go crawling through abandoned buildings in the dead of night sacrificing our slowest friends to a ravening horde!
Here’s a video they put out about their campaign give it a watch and if you feel like donating to the cause their Indiegogo page is HERE.

This idea may be getting its first test drive this side of the pond, however, this week at – drum roll please- San Diego Comic Con! The Walking Dead Escape will be taking over San Diego’s Petco Park and is an interactive 55 minute walker dodging run to your evac out of the contamination zone. With tickets available for spectators as well as participants that will crawl, climb, and sprint to safety (the first 10,000 survivors to make it to the evac zone will get a free issue #100 variant Walking Dead comic) and the chance to volunteer to be a walker and get your zombie make over from Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX this is the zombie event of the summer. This is practically a perfect dry run for the idea of Z World and if it gains near the level of success that I think it should then this should really give a boost to the Z World idea.
And if that’s not enough for you a company in England, Wish Co.UK, ran an immersive zombie outbreak simulation similar to the Walking Dead Escape last month in an abandoned mall in Reading that was so successful at approximately $230 a pop (£139) that they have added a new manor house encounter and more dates for the mall one. It looks like Z World Detroit may not be so far-fetched an idea after all.
Here is some great video ABC did of the mall encounter. It looks likes like they had a blast.

So- are you ready for the coming outbreak or do you need to sign up for some training?