After a successful run in South Surrey last year, the Lower Mainland’s first live-action zombie fighting game is looking for a new home in Langley.
“We sold out a week into the season,” said game creator Ron McCall, a Langley resident with years of film and television experience that includes horror and action-adventure productions like Hellraiser: Hellseeker, Vampire, and Max Havoc: Ring of Fire.
The outdoor evening adventure game launched Sept. 15 and ran until the end of November, when the weather got too wet and cold to continue.
By then, there were 350 people on a waiting list to play.
“We’re looking to expand,” said McCall, who has been talking to the Township of Langley about finding a new site.
McCall said the Township staffers he’s spoken to so far have told him there doesn’t seem to be anything in municipal regulations that covers a zombie apocalypse, even the pretend variety, but he’s hoping they’ll see the potential benefits.
“We could be bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars of tourism,” McCall said.
McCall got the idea for a live-action zombie fighting game when he was playing paintball during a first-season wrap party for the True Justice television series he worked on.
McCall compares the “Zombie Combat Zone” he developed with business partner Jen Yarnell to “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” the often-staged improvisational live theatre production that has audience members become part of the show by pretending they are guests at a profoundly dysfunctional and funny wedding.
Only rather than confetti and cheap wine, McCall’s show involves weapons and the undead.
Groups of eight to 10 players go on an after-dark mission into a zombie-infested zone to locate and rescue a group of missing scientists, discover the source of the plague that has caused the dead to rise, and, if possible, stop it.
Unlike ordinary paintball games, players only shoot at zombies, not other players.
Players use lower-pressure paintball guns, and no physical contact is allowed between zombie performers and players.
McCall is already thinking about a follow-up, non-zombie game.
One possibility is a Predator-themed game, based on the dreadlocked human-hunting aliens first seem in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film.