Zombie RPG - Annie Mitsoda Interview @ RPG Codex

There's an irreverant interview with Annie Mitsoda (née Carlson) at RPG Codex, covering her background and work history, working on an indie game and, of course, ZRPG:

14. What spawned the idea of a role-playing game involving the living dead? Where any other ideas on the cards for your first game? Why not make Barbie's RPG Adventures? What lead to you finally settling on the ZRPG? What inspired the game? What sort of themes are you exploring and why?

There were other ideas, and once Brian and I decided we were going to work with Vince and co, I looked at Brian and was like "well, what do you think would work best in the AoD engine?" and he said - with a great intense look in his eyes - "A zombie survival RPG." And I closed my Big Book O' RPG Ideas and went "OK. Convince me." And by God he did. (And by that I don't mean naughty things, I mean that he actually convinced me it was a good idea by using words.)

So these other ideas still exist - and we've got other ideas that have come up since - but we're holding onto them until ZRPG is in the can, as it were. We don't want to pull a Molyneux and get neck deep in one idea before we see something shiny and go galumphing after it elsewhere.

Brian has always loved the hell out of zombie movies, and while I was sort of like "meh" on them at first, this was admittedly because I had not seen the original Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead, although I'd loved Shawn of the Dead and read The Zombie Survival Guide until its accuracy started to wig me out a little (although its awesomeness was not to be denied, and I actually ended up giving a copy of it to my brother). And the concept of zombies as a force of nature as well as something individually terrifying is really compelling to me - as Max Brooks said in an interview once, "Zombies are also scary because they come to you. " There's something particularly creepy and invasive about zombies that touches on really deep fears of unbecoming ourselves, of being infected with something, of being helpless against a far greater power.

Brian's mentioned as well being inspired by living through Hurricane Andrew as a kid, and the stories he tells about it are the kind of vivid you get when you've really been shocked by something. I tease him about being super paranoid about always locking the door or closing the windows even though we live in a nice neighborhood, but I've lived the comfortable kind of life that involves never having my house broken into or living through a major natural disaster. There's documented evidence about how completely people fall apart during disasters - not in hysterics but more being totally frozen and stunned - and it's a terrifying thing to think about.

What would you do if your world was suddenly populated with monsters, and not only are they outside, but one of them is someone you love? Zombies and zombie fiction doesn't have the neat little trappings of most horror stories - where the world as a whole is still functioning and fine and dandy, and it's only your particular sphere of reality that is being immediately fucked - it's about the breakdown of society, and confronting a whole big basketload of fears all at once and over an extended period of time. You're not trying to survive until morning so that freaky vampire goes away - it's survival of the fittest from now on, because zombies don't give a shit what time it is.