Proletariat readies Thursday launch of mobile game World Zombination

Proletariat is getting ready to spend some of the $6 million it raised last week to launch its mobile game World Zombination on Thursday.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Proletariat will launch its mobile strategy tower defense game on iOS. The title is a massively multiplayer online game where one side plays as humans and the other side plays as zombies. Because the world doesn’t have enough zombie games, or at least ones with a hopeful and humorous art style. Smartphone and tablet gamers can now live out their dreams of destroying the world with a massive zombie horde or helping the last human survivors escape the undead.

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Proletariat raised its round of funding last week from FirstMark Capital and Atlas Ventures. Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark Capital and Nabeel Hyatt from Spark Capital joined Proletariat’s board.

“The promise of the first game built up the interest in the funding round,” Proletariat project lead Seth Sivak said in an interview with GamesBeat.

He said that the company will use some of its money for acquiring users for World Zombination.

The company started working on the game in April 2013, and it began testing in New Zealand and Australia in May 2014. It stayed in beta testing for about nine months, and it is now ready to go live.

“If World Zombination blows up, we’re going to need to get a lot of capital quickly,” Sivak said.

The game will debut on Android at a later date, Sivak said. The company is also planning on using its funding for one or two more games for mobile devices, he said.

World Zombination offers a variety of strategies for both sides, and it layers in deep and compelling progress systems and multiplayer combat, Sivak said.

Infected zombies attack cities around the world with reverse tower defense gameplay, spawning hundreds of zombie drones and then mutating them into powerful special zombies like sludge-spewing Spitters and Harbingers who explode on contact.

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Survivors can place units in strategic locations in tower defense style gameplay. They can place humans with weapons such as shotguns, chain saws, and other weapons to mow down the zombies. You can collect, manage, and upgrade your human and zombie armies.

It may look like a Clash of Clans game with zombies, but you don’t build or manage a base. It’s more like a traditional tower defense game with asynchronous combat, Sivak said. You can also play head-to-head in player versus player, compete in large-scale Faction Wars, and engage in Guild Raids. There are more than 50 cities on the shared world map, with procedurally generated missions. That means you get a new map every time.

As for the zombies, you don’t directly control them. But you can drive them at targets using a flare, which will steer them in a certain direction for a number of seconds. That’s a feature used in Supercell’s Boom Beach game. The zombies are always on offense, and the humans are always on defense.

“With the art style, we tried to keep the feeling light,” Sivak said. “We called it the ‘fun pocalypse,’ more like Mad Max than The Walking Dead.”

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Sivak’s company is one of a handful of game companies that have received funding in the Boston area, such as The Tap Lab and Disruptor Beam. Proletariat’s team includes veterans from at well-known studios including Harmonix, Insomniac, Turbine, Media Molecule, and Disney.