For those unaware, the pitch for the recently released zombie road film Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is as straightforward as it is evocative – Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead. If you’ve seen the trailer or the original teaser scene, you’ll know this pitch rings true in execution. For fans of the concept that didn’t catch one of the limited theatrical releases for Wyrmwood, the good news is the film is available now in Australia.

The better news is that writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner is actively hunting for the right developer to transpose the premise, set pieces and characters of the film into a game. As it turns out, Kiah and his brother Tristan (who co-wrote and produced the Wyrmwood film) have a gaming history. “I used to be a huge gamer,” says Kiah. “Ever since I started making films, I kind of stopped for some reason. The problem with gaming is it just sucks your time. I’d sit down and obsess over a game and wouldn’t stop playing it until I’d finish.



“Tristan is [still] a lot more into [gaming] than I am, and there was a point, actually, halfway through the filming process, where he bought all his games and said, ‘Dude, can you hide these because they’re fucking my life.’ So I’d hide them and he’d come to me like a junkie going, ‘Can I just have GTA for a couple of days?’ And I’d be, like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And so I’d ration the games out to him.”

Putting his game addiction on hold was essential for Kiah in terms of dedicating more than three years of his life to creating a film that many said couldn’t be done. “There’s always people saying you can’t do that and you can’t do this,” he explains. “But I think if you want to do something, you should do it. If you think it’s a good idea, you’ve got to get out there and give it a crack. I’ve never listened to stigmas. Everybody when we started making this film told us it couldn’t be done. ‘What’s your budget? You’ve got no budget? There’s no way you can make this film. No way.’ And I’m just, like, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck you. I went out and did it. It took three and a half years, and here we are.”

He said this primarily in response to discussions about the stigma associated with films being converted into games, and vice versa. It was a topic that Kiah had clearly already thought about in terms of his desire to adapt Wyrmwood from film to game, citing his hopes of game adaptations that are being treated with respect, at least in terms of the talent attached. “The Assassin’s Creed movie is coming out with Michael Fassbender,” reasoned Kiah. “Directed by Justin Kurzel [director of Snowtown] who’s a pretty bloody amazing director. If they nail that the way they should, I think that will start to change people’s minds.”



With the Duncan Jones-directed Warcraft film rumoured to have a budget in the vicinity of $100 million, and Sam Raimi developing an adaptation for The Last of Us (scripted by Neil Druckmann, who wrote the game), it certainly seems that Hollywood is taking game adaptations seriously again by focusing on narrative-rich source material. In terms of finding parity between source material and adaptation, it’s probably why Kiah has already discussed the possibility of a Wyrmwood game with the lead actors of the film.

“We’re actively looking into it and it’s just about finding the right company to partner up with,” said Kiah. “We’d love to find a young, hungry company that we can collaborate with. Obviously, it’d be fantastic to get it done properly, so you 3D scan all the actors, and all the actors are up for doing the voices. You could really make a story out of it. The possibilities are fantastic.” According to Kiah, finding the right developer fit for a Wyrmwood game isn’t as simple as saying yes to the first developer that shows an interest, either. Instead, finding the right dev team is essential to hosting a successful crowdfunding campaign, which is the intent for the Wyrmwood game.

“In order to have a successful crowdfunding campaign for a game, you have to have a vaguely successful company on board,” explained Kiah. “You can’t just go out with some rookie developers fresh from school and ask for money. You’ve got to go out there and say, ‘No, we’re developing this game. You know us; you know them.’ I think then you’ve got a decent shot at getting a couple of million dollars.” He’s not wrong, either. The more successful crowdfunded games have been associated with trusted developers, household names or sequels to dormant IPs.



As for Wyrmwood, it’s not that difficult to imagine the ease of translation from film to game. In many respects, the plot of the movie lends itself to interesting game mechanics. [Spoiler Alert for those who have yet to see the film or trailer.] “You’ve got to pick up zombies for fuel,” said Kiah, in reference to converting plot device to game mechanic. “You’ve got to get from A to B, and there’s an amazing zombie truck with a harpoon on top. You can play as Brooke, who can control zombies telepathically and use them [zombies] to fight the soldiers. You can play as Barry who’s got a massive shotgun, or as Benny who’d be like the sniper because he’s got his rifle.

“Every time you run out of petrol, you’ve got to pick up another zombie, and if you don’t pick up enough zombies, you get stranded through the night and you’ve got to basically do the same thing, except the zombies get really fast during the night.” Kiah emphasised the importance of not just switching between playable hero characters, with unique skills, but also being able to pick a side from the outset.

“The other thing that I’d be really excited about would be you could, if you want, play the soldiers,” said Kiah. “Your job would be to maraud around the country picking up A-negative survivors and handing them off to the doctor, and then Barry, Benny and Brooke would be your enemies. They’d be constantly trying to hunt you down and destroy you, and you’d have to kill them first. Of course, you’d have all of these amazing weapons, as well as flamethrowers and a minigun on top of the truck. As you can tell, we’ve been thinking about this a fair bit.” [End of plot spoilers.]



Beyond this direct translation, it’s clear that games influenced not just the structure but also how Wyrmwood was shot. “In a lot of the reviews we’ve had people say that it feels a little bit like a videogame,” explained Kiah, “because there’s a lot of first-person cinematography where [the characters are] Steadicam-ing through, seeing zombies and blowing their heads off. That was very much something that we did intentionally because we were such avid gamers for so long, so I think that creeps into the film.” This emphasis on gamified violence is part and parcel with the zombie genre but, for Kiah, the attraction was akin to his experience with GTA games.

“I’ll never forget the first time I played GTA,” recalled Kiah. “What happens the first time you play GTA is the same thing that happens to every single person. Whenever you introduce somebody to it, they start to play, and they start to kind of go, ‘Okay, I need to go here and do this, and here are the things I need to accomplish, but eventually you get bored and beat somebody to death with a baseball bat just to see what it looks like. Everyone picks up a bat and hits somebody and the blood flows, and then they’ll do it a couple more times. There’s something innate in the human character that wants to bash things.”

This is taken a step further when dealing with the fantasy of the zombie apocalypse. “The great thing about a zombie apocalypse as a plot device, it means that you can just walk around with a bat or a shotgun and just beat people to death or shoot them in the face because they’re dead already,” said Kiah. “There’s no moral questioning here. And I think that’s one of the things that people like about the zombie genre, in that you get to basically blow your neighbour’s head off with impunity because he’s a zombie. I think that’s the huge impetus for people to enjoy these kinds of movies because there is no moral question. These are monsters lurking around, and you have to bash them and get from A to B, then develop your armour and develop your zombie-killing skills and find a shotgun. It’s like life has become a videogame, and I think people like that.”



Despite the lack of moral questioning when it comes to the effortlessness of killing a zombie, the proposed Wyrmwood game would offer a compelling moral reason to play as the soldiers, which are painted as the bad guys in the movie. For the soldiers, the end very much justifies the means. [More potential film plot spoilers to follow.] “You can be the evil soldiers which, ironically, the soldiers are killing people and collecting A-negatives along the way, but they’re actually looking for a cure,” reasoned Kiah. “So if you win the game as the soldier, you cure the zombie plague and you save the world. There’s kind of a weird little irony working there that they’re doing it through evil means, and I love the fact that you could play the soldier. Basically, their job is to pick up people with A-negative blood types and feed them to this evil doctor who does horrible experiments on them working on a cure.” [End of potential film plot spoilers.]

As for the gameplay loop for the intended Wyrmwood game, Kiah envisions it a high-speed open-world experience. “The point is, you’re getting in and out of a truck, and you’re driving down highways at speed and every now and then you’ve got the soldier truck that comes up and tries to knock you off the road,” said Kiah. “You’ve got to defeat them. You’ve got some harpoons and some shotguns. The zombie truck runs on zombies, so you’ve got this amazing nitrous ability because the zombies breathe this hardcore noxious fuel that they use as a nitro substance. So if you get two or three zombies, you can nitro it on the highways and get away from the soldiers. But every time you do that, you use up an entire zombie, so you have to stop the truck, drag a zombie into the vehicle and reattach it to the engine. There’s a time limit on all of these things.”



The prospect of not killing every undead brain-muncher you come across because they’re a valuable resource is novel in a space where headshots is the norm. Later this year, gamers will be able to fulfil their Mad Max fantasy when the game adaptation of the same name comes out, but that’s not to say that there’s not space for a zombie-fuelled open-world action title.

We’d play that game. Would you?