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At E3 2011, Ubisoft unveiled Killer Freaks from Outer Space, an original IP set to capitalize on the unique abilities of Wii U. At the time, Ubisoft described the game by saying “The dangerous and degenerate creatures from outer space we call FREAKS seek to eradicate the human species with single-minded fury.”
While that game looked promising, Ubisoft announced during its press conference this year that Killer Freaks is no more. Instead, it’s been transformed into zombie survival horror game ZombiU. During E3, host Aisha Tyler noted that “as the game was developed, the tone shifted a bit” and the killer freaks “slowly evolved” into zombies. For slightly more detail, we spoke to Ubisoft senior vice president of sales and marketing Tony Key about exactly what happened.
"We look at Killer Freaks as more of a tech demo,” Key explained. “They came up with this idea. It was an easy execution for them to use the Rabbids technology that they had built to create the Rabbids, the wire frames, to create these very quickly, these little goofy creatures. And they brought it to us as a tech demo for the Wii U saying ‘this is what we can do with the game.’ And we all thought ‘wow, that’s really cool. We should show that to Nintendo.'"
"And before you know it, it’s here at E3 as a way to demonstrate the new system," Key continued. "And as time goes by, we start to see that there’s maybe bigger and better ideas around this actual game design, and these freaks slowly started turning into zombies because zombies are much more compelling than these stupid little rats we had running around, whatever they were.”
Like Tyler, Key notes that the visual shift came along with a tonal one, and ZombiU will be considerably more serious than what we might have seen in Killer Freaks. “The team really decided that they wanted to take a more serious tone,” he said. “And it was going to be hard to do with the baddies that we had designed. It’s the same studio that made Rabbids, and their devs kept looking at it and going ‘these things need to be zombies. All I see is an ugly Rabbid when I look at this thing.’”
During a ZombiU developer demo with story design director Gabrielle Shrager, we asked about the change in direction from Killer Freaks to ZombiU. “We were having a blast with Killer Freaks. The more we got into developing specifically for the GamePad, the more we realized how absolutely ideal it is for survival horror. The fact that you have to keep your eyes on two screens at once, it’s incredibly scary,” she said. “It’s a perfect fit. You’re not going to fight it. When you’re trying to design for new technology and a new gaming experience, you want to go with what’s going to be best for that. We capitalized on everything we’d developed for Killer Freaks.”
For now, ZombiU is a Wii U exclusive, though Ubisoft told us that it could eventually go multiplatform
