About the game
Dead Rising is a 2006 action-adventure game developed and published by Capcom, originally for the Xbox 360. The story follows wartime photojournalist Frank West, who becomes trapped inside a shopping mall in the town of Willamette, Colorado, during a deadly zombie plague. West must uncover the truth behind the plague before a rescue helicopter arrives in three days to evacuate him.
The game is played from the third-person perspective and is open world, set in a large shopping mall. Frank survives by scavenging weapons to fight zombies and hostile humans, and can escort friendly survivors back to the mall's safe house. The player has 72 in-game hours, about 6 hours of real time, to finish the main story, and story and side missions are individually timed. 72 Hour Mode is the main mode. Finishing all the Case Files unlocks Overtime Mode, and finishing that unlocks Infinity Mode, a sandbox mode with no time limit.
Over 250 items can be used as weapons, from firearms and sports equipment to children's toys, furniture and tools. Melee weapons wear out and break, and guns are dropped when they run dry. Frank earns Prestige Points for killing zombies, rescuing survivors, defeating psychopaths who act as bosses, and taking photographs, which are scored in five genres. Enough points raise his level, and levels and unlocked moves carry over into a new game.
Dead Rising started development as a sequel to Shadow of Rome, but the team wanted a game aimed at the Western market and changed the story, setting and time period. The team took a more comical view of zombies than Capcom's Resident Evil games, letting players use almost anything as a weapon, and based the mall on the typical American shopping mall. One magazine reported that up to 800 zombies could appear on screen at once. A playable demo came out on Xbox Live Marketplace on August 4, 2006.
It was released on August 8, 2006 in North America, September 8 in Europe, September 14 in Australia and September 28 in Japan. In Germany the game was refused a rating, and after a Hamburg court decision in June 2007 it was prohibited there from late August 2007. Capcom later won a lawsuit brought by the owners of the Dawn of the Dead films, which was dismissed in October 2008.
Dead Rising received generally favorable reviews and averages 85 out of 100 across review sites. Reviewers liked the sandbox style, the amount to explore in the mall, and the sheer number of ways to kill zombies. The common complaints were the save system, the survivor AI and the way the transceiver rings at Frank. A further complaint was that on standard-definition and small HD sets the on-screen text was hard to read. Capcom shipped around 500,000 copies in the first month and one million worldwide by the end of 2006.
The game joined the Xbox 360 Platinum Hits lineup and led to three sequels, Dead Rising 2 in 2010, Dead Rising 3 in 2013 and Dead Rising 4 in 2016. A Wii version, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, came out in 2009, a remaster for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One came on September 13, 2016, and Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster followed on September 19, 2024.
The text above is adapted from Wikipedia and licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
What critics said
Metacritic 85 out of 100 (Xbox 360). Individual reviews: Game Informer 9.3/10, TeamXbox 8.7/10, GameSpot 8.4/10, IGN 8.3/10, Eurogamer 8/10, GamesRadar 8/10, GameTrailers 7.8/10, GameSpy 4.5/5.
Extra content
Capcom sold nine downloadable keys after the US release, each unlocking a locker in the Security Room with a new outfit, and added three more on May 31, 2007. The Xbox 360 store closed on July 29, 2024, so they can no longer be bought there.
- Security Room locker keys (12 outfit keys): Nine keys came first, and three more were added on this date. Each unlocks a Security Room locker with a new outfit.
Good to know
- The Zombie Genocider achievement asks for 53,594 zombie kills.
- Germany refused to rate the game, then banned its sale in 2007, so German players imported it.
- The game was designed for HD televisions, so the on-screen text is hard to read on standard-definition sets. Capcom said it would not patch it.
- Some of the joke weapons are Capcom nods, like the Mega Man Megabuster toy that fires tennis balls, and X armour from the Mega Man X series is a wearable outfit.
- The Xbox 360 list has 50 achievements for 1,000 gamerscore and none of them need online play.
- Experience, levels and moves carry over into a new game, which makes later playthroughs much easier.
- The cover carries a warning label that Capcom used to separate the game from the Dawn of the Dead films.
Made by
Director Yoshinori Kawano, Producer Keiji Inafune, Programmer Shigeru Kato, Artist Keiji Ueda, Writer Yoshinori Kawano, Writer Makoto Ikehara, Composer Hideki Okugawa, Composer Marika Suzuki.
