#26 Zombie-Proof Housing: Property Guide to the Apocalypse

With house prices taking a dip there has never been a better chance to get into the market. And with the zombie apocalypse only being a matter of time, you want to make sure your new dream home is ready for anything.

The idea of buying your very own post-apocalyptic bolt hole is a staple of science fiction satire. Back when he was good, Ben Elton wrote a novel called This Other Eden which was about a company selling personal biospheres for people to move into to live out the looming ecological breakdown.

The videogame franchise Fallout is full of hokey 50s style adverts for massive underground vaults where you and your family can move into to avoid the bombs dropping. 

It’s fertile ground for satire- the idea of society facing its looming destruction by trying to sell yet more consumer goods is just the sort of over-the-top, extreme, exaggerated metaphor for consumerism that sci-fi does so well.

So, here are some reviews of real life post-apocalyptic residences that you can actually buy with real money.

Satire is dead.

And the best part is- they will only rise in value when they’re the only structures still standing.

1: The Safe House

If you’re a zombie nut who spends any amount of time on the Internet (and according to Google analytics, you are) you’ll have probably seen this place already. Built by Polish architects KWK Promes, the safe house looks like the sort of spacious, contemporary property you would expect to see lived in by a successful movie star or cocaine dealer. However, at the flick of a switch the building transforms Tracy Island style into a locked down zombie-proof fortress of doom.

Just don't get caught in the draw bridge.

The architects say: “The innovation of this idea consists in the interference of the movable walls with the urban structure of the plot. Consequently, when the house is closed (at night for example) the safe zone is limited to the house’s outline. In the daytime, as a result of the walls opening, it extends to the garden surrounding the house.”

What we say: Okay, this place is pretty secure, you’re probably going to be living a pretty luxurious life in there and there’s room for you and your whole family. There’s the problem. It’s not all that hard to make a home secure from zombies, with a bit of work you can make a farmhouse or even a pub a secure place to hide from the zombie menace. That’s never what gets you. What gets you is the people you’re with, the tensions, and rivalries, the silent power struggles.

How long do you think you’ll last through the end of days if you’re stranded with people you can’t make it through Christmas dinner with?

It keeps the zombies out, and the sound of screaming in.

2. Vivos Shelters

Terra Vivos’s facilities- advertised here in a video heavily influenced by Battlestar Galactica’s opening credits, are probably the closest thing we have yet to Fallout’s Vault-Tec facilities.

Their website is a masterpiece of marketing- few companies selling products this high end would have the balls to actually include a “Prophecy” section on their website, as well as a list for the most “viable scenarios” for your imminent fiery death (zombies aren’t on the list, but the 2012 predictions are). It even has helpful countdown clock to the 2012 apocalypse on the left hand side, like some sort Armageddon oriented Ebay.

The service they provide is called “Life Assurance” which is a bit like “Life Insurance”, and so sounds like a real, legitimate business.

But Vivos doesn’t just offer one shelter, oh no! In this day and age where you car, mobile phone and choice of music player say so much about you, would you settle for anything less than fully personalised salvation?

The Deluxe Model

They say: “At 137,000 square feet, spanning four levels, this facility will be the largest, strongest and most defensible Vivos shelter in North America, accommodating over 900 people for up to one year of autonomous, underground survival.  It will also be the first Vivos shelter to come online, in early 2011.  Due to the massive size and economies provided by the scale of this shelter, Vivos is able to offer a limited number of membership spaces at just $25,000 per person.”

We say: That’s right, you don’t want to die because of some piddly family drama. You want to go what professionals call “The full Lord of the Flies.” Still, this looks like some pretty sweet digs, kinda reminds me of the laboratory they lived in in the Andromeda strain. Of course, the stuff that’s actually been built so far looks like this:

Which is less appealing. Still according to their timer as of writing they have 478 Days, 02 Hours, 36 Minutes, 08 Seconds Remaining, so as long as there isn’t an unexpected apocalypse before then, you’re laughing. The only real problem here is the price. They quote $25,000 per person here for their Nebraska facility, but at the Indiana facility prices are already at $35,000 per person, with prices set to rise to $50,000 once the initial spaces are sold. That’s a pretty hefty investment, and even if you think that’s a small price to pay to survive the coming hell storm, if you’ve got a family you need to seriously consider whether you love them that much.

And of course, the shelter is only designed to keep your sheltered for a year. If Fallout 3 taught me anything, it’s that if you live in an underground bunker through the apocalypse only to climb out onto the surface of a blasted Earth later, you’re basically going to get your lilly-white ass handed to you by all the Mad Max types who just stood outside and took their nuclear blast like a man.

The Economy Model

They say:“Vivos is now offering an economical shelter solution for the average person and family. A recent survey of Vivos members revealed that nearly two-thirds cannot afford to purchase a share for themselves and their family in one of our First Class shelters. With our goal being to save as many lives as possible, Vivos is reworking one of the largest facilities to accommodate 1,000 people at a very affordable rate of just $9,950 per person. Now, virtually anyone can afford a boarding pass into an impervious Vivos underground shelter to survive whatever man-made or natural cataclysms may lie ahead.”

We say: Okay, so it turns out you did love your family that much, and so rather than spend 30 grand on living it up in 5 star cursed-Earth luxury, you decided to split it three ways and get a less flashy accommodation for you, your partner and the least obnoxious of your two kids.

For that, you get... well you get four bunkbeds and a curtain:

Pro tip: For maximum domestic harmony arrange a "Wank rota" where three of you will be out of the room at pre-arranged times.

Still, at $9,950 per person? With property prices the way they are now, I’d actually be up for that if they let me move in straight away.

3. My House

It has a lockable front door, barbed wire at the rear garden fence, a wide selection of garden implements for self-defence, plus a nice old man lives next door who owns and knows how to use a machete. Plus I’ve been reliably informed by the British government that the cupboard under the stairs is a perfectly adequate fallout shelter.

Yeah, I’ll be fine.

#4 Left 4 Dead: How A Videogame Makes You Act Like You're in a Movie

I’m going to start this blog the way I start most things- by talking about Batman. Specifically, Batman: Arkham Asylum, the videogame by Rocksteady Studios. What I really loved about this game was that when you were playing it you felt like Batman. Rather than being a stand run and punch ‘em up where the protagonist happened to be wearing a batman costume, the gameplay has you scoping out enemies, gliding over them dramatically, swooping down and picking them off one by one as if you were being directed by Christopher Nolan. An ingenious use of Batman’s gadgets, “detective vision” and an enemy AI that is that special kind of stupid reserved for evil henchmen, bring you as close to being Batman as you can hope for without watching your parents bleed to death in an alleyway.

Actual game footage

This is actually an astounding achievement. Storytelling in games has come along a pretty much infinite amount since I started playing games and the exposition amounted to “The princess is in another castle”, but something they still very rarely accomplish is getting a player to take on the role of somebody else. Even in games that are admired for their storytelling achievements, such as the Halo or Half-Life series, the protagonist is still a faceless or voiceless cipher for us to project our fantasies onto.

These two are basically the same character

Even in games where the protagonist is well-drawn, all the work of the artists, writers and voice actors can be fucked up by the universal truth that gamers are basically dicks. In Grand Theft Auto IV, the main character is one Niko Bellic.

Niko is a tortured soul who survived an abusive upbringing and the horrors of the Yugoslavian Wars and has now come to the United States to escape his bloody past, however circumstances tragically draw him back into the violent underworld he has tried so hard to free himself from.

Except when I’m playing he also tends to be the sort of person to crash a helicopter into a hot dog stand for shits and giggles. Now Niko is clearly a many faceted human being, but it’s hard to reconcile these two sides of his personality.

Chris, Your Commentary is Insightful and Though Provoking and Incidentally, Your Hair Looks Amazing, but isn’t This Blog Supposed to be About Zombies?

You make an excellent point Sycophantic Voice Inside My Head. So let’s take a look at the Left 4 Dead games, which manage, ingeniously, to manipulate the player into acting like a character from a zombie apocalypse movie.

So Left 4 Dead is a game where you play one of four survivors, fighting your way across a zombie infested wasteland hoping to get to safety.

In the first game the survivors are Bill, a grizzled ‘Nam veteran, Francis, a badass biker who hates things, Zoe, the movie geek, and Louis who most people remember for his upbeat, optimistic attitude.

Now you mention it, she is a girl and he is black. I never noticed that before.

The characters all have distinct, if broadly drawn personalities and quickly worm their way into your affections, but this shouldn’t surprise you coming from the company that introduced us to the Companion Cube (who you killed, you bastard).

As I’ve mentioned before, in most zombie movies the zombies are almost incidental- they are merely an excuse to put a bunch of people who don’t get on together in a room and force them to cooperate. Having such distinctive characters with clashing personalities helps build that kind of atmosphere, but that’s not where the stroke of genius comes from. That comes from making the game cooperative. It won’t be the characters arguing, it will be YOU.

Just How Much Do You Like Your Friends?

As you progress through the game, there will be supplies, such as first aid kits, pain pills and grenades that will come in finite supply, and need to be divided up fairly among your survivors. In the second game this is expanded to include special weapons and ammunition.

What’s more, the game is full of situations which you simply cannot get out of without the help of other players. As well as the regular hordes (fast moving zombies, for those keeping count) there are also a variety of “special” infected. Rather than go through the whole list here, I’ll just give you one example of a special infected, and how it manipulates the player into playing the role of a character in a zombie movie, while also encouraging team play.

You know how in horror movies there is always one self-serving prick who flees for his life leaving everyone else to a horrible death? He usually has slicked back hair and probably wears some sort of suit. What happens to that guy? Every single time? That’s right.

In Left 4 Dead, the same thing happens. If you decide to leg it and leave your pals to die, the moment you’re out of reach of everyone else a special “Hunter” zombie will leap out of the shadows, pin you to the ground and proceed to rip you a new arsehole. If you’re lucky your team mates will come along and kick him off.

If you’re not, they’ll get distracted by something shiny while your entrails are being yanked out, and yet they’ll still have the gall to ask you to plug their band’s website. 

Moral Dilemmas. For Those of us with Consciences. Tom.

There are a lot of games now, such as Bioshock, Fable and Fallout 3, that like to pretend to give you moral dilemmas, but these choices are nearly always black and white- do you save the nun and the band of orphans in her care, or do you hand them over to the evil lava demon because it pays better and is funny?

None of these dilemmas will give you as much pause as when you have the last first aid kit and your friend is limping along with their character constantly grouching that “They don’t think they’ll make it much longer”. Sure, you could heal them- but you’re down to half health yourself and you might need it later. You’ll face the same feeling when, after a mad dash for the finish line you’ve made into the safe room, only to realise you’re on your own and the other three survivors are being swarmed by the undead. Do you go back and help, or simply close the door and wait for the sound of screams to die out? (This dilemma can be harder when your team mates take longer to die.)

That is how you put a gameplayer in a moral dilemma, they are the sorts of dilemmas zombie movies thrive on, and they are far more compelling than the usual “pick an alignment” choose-your-own-adventure choices most games give you. These situations aren’t carefully scripted or staged events put together by the programmers, they arise naturally out the rules of the game and just how much you like the people you’re playing with.

Tell Us A Story

One of the things I love about the zombie apocalypse genre is that it isn’t a genre prone to huge amounts of plotting. More often than not, characters are simply dumped in a room together, surrounded by the undead and left to bounce off one another, and Left 4 Dead is a game that thoroughly embraces this spirit. It has some strongly drawn characters, and while other zombie movies tell the wider story of the apocalypse through TV and radio broadcasts, Left 4 Dead tells its story through the signs posted around the deserted city, the corpses of less fortunate survivors (either ripped in half or carefully covered over by their companions) and the messages scrawled across the walls of the Safe Rooms.


The true cost of the zombie holocaust

But the real stories in Left 4 Dead are the ones the players make themselves, the anecdotes of close escapes and horrific deaths. One of the scariest games I ever played (and more than once have we finished a late night zombie-killing session and decided we needed to watch some cartoons before bed) didn’t feature hordes of zombies or even that much violence. Instead, it was when me and another player were stuck standing completely still for an age while a Tank (kind of like a zombified Incredible Hulk) ran round in circles in the room beneath us. Think the T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park but without Jeff Golblum’s calming influence.

If you want to read more about emergent story-telling (in the context of killing zombies, of course) I heartily recommend this article.

In the mean time, we should tally up the drinking game scores. So, the end of each level in Left 4 Dead ends with you under siege in some manner of building (One shot) waiting to be rescued. When the survivors finally get picked up by the military at the end of the first game, this happens so it’s fair to say the rescuers are both incompetent and more dangerous than the zombies (Two shots).. When you do come across the army they call the zombies “Whiskey Deltas” for “Walking Dead” so it’s fair to say they are the walking dead (One Shot) although they also run and can be killed by shooting them pretty much anywhere. Oh, and is mankind the real monster? Does mankind include Tom? (One shot)

It’s occurred to me that of the last four blogs, three of them have featured running zombies, so next week we’re going to be looking at a slightly more traditional zombie apocalypse, for those of us who want to live like kings in the post-apocalyptic wasteland without all that jogging.