What a double feature.
The Dawn of the Dead game is a collector’s item, and it’s priced accordingly. Luckily, you can download the whole thing at Home Page of the Dead. From Board Game Geek:
Dawn of the Dead (based on the classic 1978 horror film) can be played as a two-player game (humans vs. zombies), as a solitaire game, or as a cooperative game with two to four players controlling the human heroes. The game map represents the shopping mall from the movie. Cardboard counters signify the human characters and zombies. To win, the zombie player must kill any three characters; the human player must secure the mall by closing all four entrances and eliminating all zombies within.
SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.) was a leading publisher of board wargames throughout the ’70s. The company went bankrupt in 1982. Because SPI defaulted on a loan from TSR, Gygax and co. acquired its trademarks and copyrights in 1983.
Electronic Mall Madness precisely represents the degenerate vanity and vacuity satirized by Romero in DotD. I’m not sure where that leaves me, because I think it’s really pretty and I want to hear the mall talk.
2 Warps to Neptune 
You know, a motivated board gamer could certainly adapt the rules to combine these two games. The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, in this case…
That’s what I was thinking. Somebody made a new game board for the DOTD game, and I’ve seen miniatures as well. You can see the revised board via the Home of the Dead site.
Making it 3D, though? And maybe an RPG too? That would be the stuff. And give me the option, like in the original, to play solo.
What a great game double-feature — and yes, a motivated gamer could definitely combine these two. I know two very successful game designers and will put them to wicked work…Your site is my favorite of the year!
Thanks, Christian! Comments like that keep me going…
I was chuckling to myself while putting the post together, and I knew you guys would get it.
The best. I even imagined a hexagonal map print on the mall floor and plastic (or pewter!) human and zombie figurines. That would rule.
Oh my these are wonderful. Great post! Yeah the combination of the two would be incredible.
Is there an arcade? You could go to the arcade and play the Zaxxon or Pac Man board game for some game-within-a-game madness.
You’d need a lot of floor space for that set up! I got the Zaxxon board game a few months ago but I haven’t played it yet.
My girlfriend and I play it quite a bit. The gameplay is excellent but the rules are not intuitively written and a bit confusing at first. We have tossed around the idea that we could re-write them in a less confusing manner but haven’t gotten around to it and probably won’t now that we actually understand how the game works. She kicks my ass every time, and I mean EVERY time.
BTW I really meant to post this in the most recent post that linked to this 😉