Zombies, Run! Came out in 2012, and for a summer it completely took over my life. The creators of Zombies, Run! saw the way that dogs will gleefully lap up their medicine if you bury it in a spoonful of peanut butter, and decided they could get nerds to exercise using the same strategy. I officially retired from exercising after running the second-slowest mile in my sophomore gym class, but a few years later the fear of being chased by zombies got me back out on the track and training almost every day. This kind of podcast-style exercise app was so effective at getting my dork ass off the couch that I was convinced it would be the start of a fitness revolution for gamers - but it wasn’t. I’ve been waiting over ten years for the game industry to realize the potential of Zombies, Run!, and now we’re finally getting it with Marvel Move.
If you never played Zombies, Run!, it’s a mix between a fitness training app and a narrative fiction podcast. Each chapter is around 30 minutes long and structured around the pace of a work out. The story casts you as a runner in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland whose job is to gather supplies and go on missions for the people at Abel’s township. Missions start off slow as you listen to conversations and exposition that move the story forward from episode to episode, but eventually you’ll find yourself on the run from a zombie hoard.
Not everyone is interested in gamifying their lives, but it really worked for me. The story was engrossing and well-acted, which made me eager to get out and hear the next chapter. Because you were part of the story, it was so much more immersive than listening to an audiobook or a podcast. There are stretches in each session where you’re just out on your own traveling from one place to another, at which point that app automatically swaps over to your own music until you get there. That structure gave me an intention to exercise that I never had before. And when the zombies came for me, I ran my ass off because I was invested in the story. You also earn more items and higher scores for running faster, which was a great incentive for my goopy goblin gamer brain.
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The undead fell out of the zeitgeist for a while, and I got older and lazier, so it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Zombies, Run!. I always expected this kind of fitness program to blow up, but it never really did. Pokemon Go encourages active movement, but it doesn’t have the narrative quality of Zombies, Run!, nor is it conducive to intense workouts. Ring Fit Adventure will kick your ass, but it’s also missing the immersive narrative quality of Zombies, Run!, and it’s also played in doors in front of your TV - not out in the world.
Zombies, Run! Creator Six to Start just announced a new platform for fitness experiences, called ZRX, and one of its flagship games is Marvel Move - a superhero reskin of Zombies, Run!. Marvel Move will feature five separate storylines that can be customized to meet your time, distance, and intensity goals.
Six to Start got real fiction authors and Marvel comics writers to develop the stories for Marvel Move, and the premises are intriguing. The five storylines are Thor & Loki: Asgard 5K Training; X-Men: Age of Orchis; The Hulk: Hulkville; Daredevil: Terminal Degree; and Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch: In Dreams. There’s some exciting talent and concepts behind these storylines, which will each span several weeks. I’m particularly interested in Age of ORCHIS, which casts you as a mutant on Krakoa working alongside the X-Men. The author, Tini Howard, wrote some of the best X-Men stories of the last few years, and considering how Orchis has played a bigger role in the comics recently, this feels like a timely storyline for X-Men fans, even if it isn’t technically canon.
As dubious as I am about the proliferation of popular media in every facet of our lives, it’s hard to be mad about an app that helps people improve their health - especially if it’s as high-quality as Zombies, Run! is. This could be the start of an explosion in the genre I’ve been waiting a decade for, and I’d love to see more IP get the Marvel Move treatment in the future. If this takes off, we could see similar experiences for Star Wars, Pokemon, Disney, and DC too.
Marvel Move and the ZRX app launch this summer. You canlearn more about Marvel Move on the official website.
