Written by Matte
Welcome to my game
I put zombies in it for your pain
They come shambling out from the sides
You'd better shoot them or you're gonna die
These lyrics begin the first movement of the soundtrack to the 2009 co-op twin-stick shooter I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1 (hereafter referred to as IMAGWZII) with a low-fi, grungy, three piece rock band bouncing along behind the vocals. You have, perhaps, noticed stylized spelling of the very literal title of this game. Let’s talk about 2009.
By the late 2000s the cultural phenomenon of “leet speak” (derived from “elite speak” and often written as “1337 SP34K”) had saturated the culture of nerdy internet spaces as a kind of semi-ironic in-group writing system. Numbers went where they resembled l3tt3rs. Words were often C4P1T4L1Z3D, 0R SP3LLED 5TR4NG3LY, T0N3 W4S 3X4GG3R4T3D 4ND PUNCTU4T10N X-TR3M3!!111!! Exhausting. Regardless, it was a useful shorthand for not taking things too seriously and, in 2009, wasn’t quite at the point of prolonged saturation which made us all sick of it. Hell of a title for conveying tone in your game about shooting zombies with zero-to-three friends.
This is also the same year that Valve released Left 4 Dead 2, a videogame sequel only a year removed from its predecessor about, if you can believe it, shooting zombies with zero-to-three of your friends. Left 4 Dead 2 had some moderate competition in the video game scene with Resident Evil 5, a game about shooting zombies with merely zero-to-one friends. If you needed a change of pace you could go to a movie theater and see Zombieland. In 2008, the zombie comic book series The Walking Dead received the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series. It won again in 2010. Zombies were simply an inescapable part of pop culture.
IMAGWZII also came to exist under a set of market conditions that lasted less than five years. The short lived Xbox Live Indie Arcade marketplace was effectively the only easy way a broke indie developer could self publish on a game console. It also limited file sizes and only allowed teams to charge one of three possible (quite low) prices. These factors encouraged teams to make smaller, more bite sized experiences. Over time this marketplace’s open nature would flood the storefront with garbage, but for the first year or two of its existence (starting in 2008 in a more closed fashion) it was the place to be for little hamburger sized and priced games.
Having been published on the Xbox Live Indie Arcade using a 1337 SP34K title with pop culture’s favorite mob as a defining feature, I can confidently say that IMAGWZII is the most 2009 videogame to ever exist; no other cultural and economic soup could have led to this exact artifact.
It’s these extremely 2009 factors which structure the game’s mechanical experience. Enemies have the simple AI you would expect for a shorter development cycle, and the full game length lasts exactly thirteen minutes and thirty seven seconds (it is 1337 SP34K, after all). And while the mechanical experience is broadly excellent and surprisingly nuanced given its jokey, self-effacing presentation, it’s the integration with the original soundtrack that sticks with me the most.
At about the thirty five second mark the background, a repeating grass texture which was almost certainly grabbed from somewhere for free, becomes a projector for the lyrics and a medium for the slowly rotating lights seen at countless concert venues. The mechanics might reflect a lone warrior (and their lone warrior friends) in a violent last stand with a hoard of the undead, but the vibes are distinctly that of a rock show. Which lyrics prompt the shift in presentation? Why the chorus, of course:
Cause I made a game with zombies in it
The remainder of the first movement maintains this aesthetic, with its rotating lights and projected flashing lyrics, before shifting to its second movement, a black and white checkerboard featuring a new set of non-zombie enemies and a harder, grungier musical genre. This shift, and subsequent shifts to other tones and genres throughout the movements of the piece, are what solidify IMAGWZII as both clever and interesting. The way that the structure of the game is tied so closely to pacing is what elevates it from a solid arcade action game to something really special. The tempo of the backing track slows down to a psychedelic jam rock after a frantic intro, and the encounter design of the enemies follows suit. A later movement has the sort of intense Amen Break focused jungle beats common in late ‘90s clubs and videogames. All of these changes in pacing keep things engaging without being either boring or exhausting. They all follow the music and the music follows the game. The two are inseparable.
This is, for me, the most impressive feat: It is a Music Game without being a Rhythm Game. Nothing you do can impact the sound of the beat, the tempo of the track, the mixing or instrumentation, yet playing this game on mute would be unheard of. This structure fascinates me because it feels like a blueprint which has rarely been picked up. On its face it’s so simple: write a song that has some interesting pacing, then make a videogame which matches that pacing, and now you have a memorable and compact experience. There are many non rhythm music games which do this in discrete chunks (the levels of Sayonara Wild Hearts), and many games which use a music themed area for added variety (the music levels of Rayman Legends¹), but each of these are segmented. The most compelling structural element of IMAGWZII is a game as an EP. As with many classic albums, the movements all flow into one another seamlessly. It adopts the structural stylings of a prog rock ballad, blending each segment into the next, making what would be a set of distinct levels into one longer experience.
This single-song approach pays off in cascading dividends. The developer doesn’t have to worry about additional UI elements for presenting each section of the game, just a start and end point. The player gets the additional tense friction of a good scrolling shooter or DOOM level, where their previous decisions on weapon selection and positioning inform their next ones as their extra lives dwindle. The length affords a large possible span of scores, which makes chasing a spot on the high score table satisfying.
So if all this works so well, if it’s such a good format for making a compelling, lower scoped, and likely cheaper way to make an experience, where did it go? Well, it probably went the same place every other one dollar fifteen minute game went: to be buried under ten thousand other games on storefronts where anyone can list a game for a dollar. The fact that anyone, even me, could find and enjoy IMAGWZII at all was only likely for a vanishingly small period of time. It was listed on a single storefront when there just weren’t that many storefronts and the selection was smaller. In the 2026 media landscape just about every digital games storefront has lowered the barrier to entry so far that one dollar games are effectively infinite. There’s probably more one dollar games released per day across, Steam, the Playstation Store, the Nintendo eShop, the Xbox store, and Itch.io to fill more than 24 hours of time.
It’s likely that IMAGWZII left an impression on at least some current developer. After all, it was big enough to have a Wikipedia Page, a Rock Band 2 Downloadable Track, and an official T-Shirt in Hot Topic. It’s not even lost to a long defunct store, you, yes you, can go and play it right now on Steam for free.²
If there’s a design legacy left by IMAGWZII, we probably won’t know about it until something carrying the torch breaks into the mainstream. There’s just too many games otherwise to know for sure. It’s fun to imagine, though. I’d like to think some suburban garage jammer with a cheap Fender or high school orchestra sax player has picked up the ball and run with it.
For now I leave you with these two things: First, if you are curious and intrepid, if your palette is wide and your experiments are many, you may see another IMAGWZII in the wild. And second, this is my high score:
Good luck.
¹ Arguably a rhythm game during these levels despite their presentation as a platformer
² A port of it, anyway. The Steam release, despite the insistence of the lyrics, is not made using XNA (it was ported to a more modern framework) and no longer costs a dollar. It does still have zombies in it for your pain though so the essentials are there.