BEHIND THE SCENES
Turn your run into a thriller
ZRX: Zombies Run + Marvel Move
Epic Running Adventures
Audio accompaniment can make or break a workout. Regular runners have probably listened to plenty of playlists and podcasts by now, so how about something meatier? Years before her breakthrough novel The Power won the UK’s 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, that's what Naomi Alderman wanted.
“I'm always looking for something that'll make it a bit easier for me to get out and do some exercise,” Alderman tells us. “In fact I've sometimes got myself through a hard workout by imagining that I'm Buffy or Scully or Wonder Woman fighting bad guys.”
The solution, it turns out, is Zombies, Run! – a fitness app which does the usual fitness app things, but also keeps you hooked into its story, penned by Alderman. The more you run, the further you progress in the narrative, picking up items and escaping the undead as the game’s hero, Runner Five.
Alderman has always had a keen interest in “stories in unusual places”. She wrote early alternate reality game Perplex City – a fictional sci-fi web series with real-world riddles to solve – and in doing so she met Adrian Hon. A keen runner, Hon later set up developer Six To Start to explore experiences that mix the virtual and the real world.
Alderman and Hon started talking. How could you combine storytelling, running and mixed reality? And what kind of story could you tell within an app? “I’d started a ‘beginning to run’ class for people who hadn't voluntarily run since primary school,” says Alderman. “The trainer asked us all why we wanted to learn to run, and one woman said, in a very dry way, ‘I want to be able to escape from the zombie horde’. So this idea was in my mind, running away from the zombie horde…”
Alderman soon realised that escaping from zombies actually works really well as a narrative concept. “People already have a strong visual in their mind of zombies,” she tells us. “And there’s a very obvious link – if you're being chased by zombies and you have no weapon, you need to run. There are so many great heart-pounding running sequences in zombie movies.”
The real challenge for Alderman was to keep Runner Five on the move throughout. There are short running breaks here and there, but when the music starts, Five needs to be running. It meant Alderman had to think creatively to keep the game’s world believable.
Fundamentally, I think everyone who stands up and goes and takes some exercise is already a hero.
Naomi Alderman
“We have an operator back at base talking to runners in the field because it makes audio storytelling so much easier,” she tells us. “The operator can say ‘I can't see what's going on! What's ahead of you?!’ Or the runners in the field can say ‘Sam, have you got cams up ahead?! What does it look like?’”
“And then we can have a lot of visual descriptions without having to have one person saying to the person standing right next to them: “my god man, can you see that eight-foot high neon dinosaur with lasers for eyes?" "Of course I can see it, Roger, I'm standing here too.””
Having landed upon some neat narrative solutions to make it work, Alderman set about writing what she terms “a good, honest, hard-crafted adventure yarn, made just like you remember from the old days. But with more swearing and Red Dwarf references.“
Zombies, Run! has not just cleverly connected fitness storytelling and narrative, it has brought together a community of runners. They contributed to the game’s development through Kickstarter and, later, real-life helicopter pilots and doctors helped Alderman with jargon her characters might use. They even helped her describe how you might triage a wound in a zombie apocalypse.
The community also made the cast more diverse. “From the early days of the game, our players decided that two characters were definitely people of colour; it seemed a good idea to me, and I'm grateful they saw it in my work and made it so in fan-fiction and fan art!“
Zombies, Run! is now into its sixth season and it continues to draw people in not just because it’s a cool idea; the intimacy that comes with audio storytelling makes it extra compelling, says Alderman.
“It feels like the characters are whispering directly into your ear,” she adds. “We’ve found that our players respond well to episodes where characters talk to them, express their feelings, dig into their backstories…it’s like going on a run with a friend who's having a crisis and being that person who just listens while they tell you what's on their mind. It can get very emotional, in a really good way.”