Spaghetti Brains!

I was eating spaghetti bolognese in Bristol at the weekend. I needed to stock up on carbs because I was about to run in 2.8 Hours Later , the zombie game that happens as part of Igfest in Bristol every year. The city centre was full of grown adults all playing very strange games with each other and having fun.



The spaghetti might be my last proper meal I figured, and I knew that I had a long run ahead of me. We queued up with over 200 other people to play this game on a Saturday night in this bustling city centre. After receiving a quick briefing, we were let loose with a map and told to make our way to the zombie resistance HQ. In order to find the HQ we had to run through zombie infested areas, find clues and try and stick together. The latter proved impossible as we were picked off by brain-hungry zombies in alleyways, underpasses, parks and shopping centres. Zombies are not as stupid as you think. They wait for food to come along and then they run after it. The hungrier they are, the quicker they run. The nearer we got to the HQ, the quicker the zombies seemed to become. They must have been olympic sprinters before they got infected. You never knew when or where a zombie would appear so the body and mind was on full alert, adrenaline flowing and the blood pumping getting ready to scarper if they appeared around the next corner. We got lost, got frightened and made new friends along the way. Survival was the name of the game and us humans tend to last longer when we work together. Very few made it to the HQ without being infected. They were just too fast for a lot of us in the end. As a game, it is well designed. It combines the sensation of genuine fear with running like mad while grinning like a ten year old, and we all remember what that feels like. Inside you were screened for infection and if you were given the all-clear you could go and have your picture taken as a zombie survivor. Those of us who got infected were not so lucky.