Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a run-and-gun action game developed by LucasArts and published by Konami, released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo and Genesis. Players take the role of the teenagers Zeke and Julie, alone or in cooperative pairs, as they race through more than fifty stages to rescue their neighbors before a rogues' gallery of horror-movie monsters can reach them. The enemies are a loving parody of B-movie and drive-in cinema: shambling zombies, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, giant ants, evil dolls, pod people, and blob creatures. The suburban settings, backyards, swimming pools, shopping malls, and cul-de-sacs, are turned into playful death traps, and the weapons lean comic, beginning with a humble water pistol and expanding to include bazookas, weed whackers, and exploding soda cans. Praised for its humor, its two-player cooperative design, and its affectionate genre pastiche, it developed a strong cult following that endured well beyond its modest sales. Its suburban-summer setting, squirt-gun weaponry, and drive-in-horror tone make it feel more like a hot July night than many of the more prestigious games that crowd summer lists, and it is a genuinely accomplished game beneath the gore-movie gloss. A spiritual successor, Ghoul Patrol, followed in 1994, though the squirt-gun original is the one that endured in players' memories.