Special: The Siege of Caiger Mall by the Armies of the Dead
Zombies and humans are friends...
The following is a chapter excerpt from my other book I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past five years. It is an extension of the Empires of EVE project that ventures across the borders of New Eden and into the other realms of online gaming to explore their histories and their links to EVE and each other. It’s called The Fates of Digital Societies, and I’ll be talking more about it periodically throughout the year as it archs toward completion.
I’m releasing this particular piece today because this week it was announced that after nearly 20 years Urban Dead would be shutting down because of new legislation in the UK. You can read more the decision to close the game here.
“Your eyes flick open, first one and then the other, staring blankly along the cold ground. Memories of sirens echo in your ears for a moment, and fade into strange and distant murmurs. Unsteadily, and on awkwardly angled limbs, you rise to your feet.”
-Urban Dead by Kevan Davis
The Zombies were on strike, and for the first time in history, the living were joining the undead cause.
All across the ruined city of Malton — population 60,000 monthly active players — the Zombies had stopped clawing at barricaded doors, and the Survivors were coming out of their safe houses.
It was December 19, 2005 inside zombie apocalypse text MMO Urban Dead, and a historic gathering was marching its way across the city in an unprecedented display of solidarity.
Together, the most natural of all enemies walked in peace down “Evill Avenue” to a city park with a nefarious past, and for the first time in the game’s history they did something other than try to kill each other.
They put on mock plays in the park. They pretended Rage Against the Machine had come for a live show to support the cause. They sang songs and chanted chants, and the more than 800 players present began to celebrate as their petition reached a symbolic threshold important among gamers of the era: 1337 signatures.
It was a demonstration meant for one person: Kevan, the game designer and de facto god of this decrepit suburban sprawl currently gripped by an even more apocalyptic problem for an online game: peace.
Urban Dead’s social ecosystem had collapsed, the Zombies alleged. The Survivors agreed.
With a nostalgic ennui the Zombies recalled the days when Urban Dead first came online. When it was a place where Survivors had to run and hide for their lives from the gray swarm, but now that swarm had been reduced to a handful of stragglers, glorified target practice in a doomsday that was looking more and more civilized with every new dawn.
At the spontaneous protest, built-in speech restrictions made it difficult for these new allies to make small talk. When most of the Zombies typed text into the game it appeared to others as a non-descript groan. They could make use of only a limited lexicon of grunts and gestures like pointing in a direction or a ‘Mrh…’ and a ‘Graaagh!’
However, more experienced zombie characters who had learned the skill “Death Rattle” had access to a more expansive set of groans, clicks, and punctuation they could use to communicate. Sort of.
They still lacked the lingual capacity for most vowels, so for instance, the word “I” was communicated by saying ‘mah zambah’ or ‘my zombie.’ While ‘we’ became ‘mah zambah brazzahz’ or ‘my zombie brothers.’ The prefix ‘nah’ could be used as a flexible modifier making any word negative or opposite. So ‘remember’ became ‘ramambarh’ while ‘forgot’ was ‘nah-ramambarh.’
This form of speech, called ‘Zamgrh,’ eventually became nearly a full-fledged English creole capable of translating, for instance, the first chapter of Beowulf or the Lord’s Prayer (both of which they did,) or more relevant to the scene now developing in the park, entire songs. One Zombie serenaded the assembly:
“Hhahan abarh hranz-manz ahm nah-ramambarh,
An nabarh brang zaa bra!n?
Hhahan abarh hranz-manz ahm nah-ramambarh,
An arrh gamz za!n?”
Which translates to:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?
Even the Survivors picked up some of the dialect. A tree near the protest gathering was spray painted by a Survivor with the words:
“Zambah anh Harmanz amh hranz!”
“Zombies and humans are friends!”
When Urban Dead first came online unity between living and undead was unthinkable. The Survivors awoke in a city torn apart by a mysterious virus theorized to have leaked from the headquarters of NecroTech corporation whose headquarters was the lone glass skyscraper in the otherwise sprawling suburban landscape. The Survivors and Zombies alike were scattered and alone.
As the players figured out how the game worked, they started to form groups for safety from their natural predators. Each other.
The humans formed Survivor strongholds, and the Zombies slowly accumulated into hordes that sought the strongholds and overran the defenses. With limited speach, Zombies obeyed simpler forms of cooperation. After skilling Death Rattle, a Zombie could access "Bellow" which allowed a zombie to let out an especially mournful holler when they'd located a stronghold with 25 or more Survivors in it. In gameplay terms it was a beacon. An APB to alert all nearby zombies of a brain buffet.
The more experienced a zombie character was, the greater their ability to control the flow of the horde.
As more and more Survivors found each other, some human factions tried to take and hold valuable locations on the map in an attempt to create a permanent settlement.
There were military forts in several locations that offered Survivors a solid defense, but the Survivor dream in this nightmare was to be able to hold one of the city’s massive malls which take up four squares on the city grid to the usual one for most other buildings.
The dozen or so malls throughout Malton were challenging to defend because there were so many entrances, but were a tempting prospect for ambitious Survivor bases because more items could be looted there than in typical buildings.
Malls had all kinds of stores where you could potentially loot golf clubs, cricket bats, ski poles and other makeshift goods that could either be used to beat up Zombies or added to the barricades. Not to mention the most critical items of all, guns and ammo.
Most crucially, malls were one of the few locations where a Scientist-class character could loot the most valuable and rare item a Survivor could find: a Revivification Syringe (5% drop rate.)
See, the Survivor and Zombie “teams” weren’t fixed. Any human who died became a Zombie. Any Zombie jabbed with a Revivification Syringe became a Survivor. The rarity of the item drop rate kept the two sides in equilibrium.
More sophisticated Survivor players would communicate with their allies in advance to set up a designated Revivification Center to meet at post-mortis. For blocks in every direction the surrounding buildings would be spray painted with coordinates the Zombies couldn’t read leading to Survivor meeting places.
You are standing outside St Luke’s Hospital, a large red-brick building with black crosses painted across its doors. The building has been very strongly barricaded.
Somebody has spraypainted Join the Resistance!! http://discord.gg/8yvTX6j onto a wall.
At those locations, kindly Doctor-class Survivors guarded by Soldiers would get xp by distributing medkits to cure infections and Scientists would administer jabs to shambling corpses who arrived pointing toward the sky (the secret code for distinguishing a friendly Zed from a harmful one. Up, resurrection.)
However, the Zombie player groups would always find these centers - often by creating a Human alternate character to read the spray painted coordinates and scout the location - and when the horde arrived the Survivors would be forced to run. A few soldiers would stay behind to repair the barricades and sacrifice themselves to slow down the inevitable. At which point they would shamble their undead bones to the rendezvous point, gesturing a gnarled finger at the clouds.
It was an infinite cycle of apocalyptic horror, and that was the point.
A Zombie could be stopped. A horde could not.
The speech restrictions that prevented Zombies from communicating with Survivors were also meant to slow down Zombie-to-Zombie communication as well and make it more challenging for hordes to form hierarchies or enact complex strategies.
Survivors had access to in-game cell phones, radio towers, and spray paint messaging. The Zombies only had Zamgrh. And that’s only if they were high enough level to speak it - and even if they could there was no guarantee the other Zombies would understand it or reply. Zombies had to leave Malton altogether to find each other on out-of-game third party forums.
As a result, many different factions developed within the horde based on which website or chatroom they organized on. Because there was so little in-game communication between them, each group developed different interpretations about what it meant to be a Zombie. To some, a Zombie was a monster who hunted humans for pleasure. To another it was a minion of Lucifer’s apocalypse sent to clear the path for the return of the Dark Prince. There were even benevolent interpretations explaining that a Zombie was a misunderstood creature of god whose “infection” actually rescued humans from death eternal. Their bite was salvation.
To deal with these contradictions, inside Urban Dead the horde’s bond was simplified to a single grunt. Across every faction a Zombie’s chief pursuit in all things was expressed through a Zamgrh word with no English equivalent. To a Zombie it is the word. The only word every zombie knew. It means something like “communion” but is used more like “victory,” and to the Zombies it describes the trancelike state of ecstasy when engorged in the communal consumption of live flesh.
”Barhah!”
From the website of a Zombie group called The MOB (Militant Order of Barhah):
“The rot is barhah. The needle is anti-barhah. True barhah is the joy of warm drippings of brains. Barhah is not found in the barrel of a gun, nor the blade of an axe, but by tilling the earth of harmanity with your own claws and teeth, planting the seeds of their future barhah.”
It was this sharply grunted word that echoed through the streets the day the Horde first learned that a group of Survivors had come together to attempt the very first mall defense.
Firefighter-class Survivors built defensive barricades to the max level to protect the Scientists as they hurried to find syringes to revive fallen Soldiers. Soldiers plugged rotters as the faceless congregation shambled forward, but even those they “killed” rose again before long.
To make matters worse, these Zombies weren’t actually brain dead. The players in control of them knew all of the mechanics required for these Survivors to hold a defense, and they had human alternate characters of their own on the inside. They would use Survivor alts to scout the enemy position.
When they finished scouting they’d roleplay that their spy character was a “Death Cultist” who worshiped the Zombies. The Death Cultist would use its last ability points to shout something ominous before PKing (Player Kill, Survivor-on-Survivor murder) a Scientist to slow down the discovery of precious syringes.
Which is why Survivors often fought among themselves about which zombies to resurrect and which strangers to allow through the barricades.
The human defenders broadcast on in-game radio frequency 27.35Mhz to attract as many nearby Survivors as possible to come to the mall to help defend and many did.
But the horde could not be stopped. The disparate factions coordinated their attacks on AOL Instant Messenger and crashed against the barricades in unison at the appointed hour each day, slowly breaking down the defenses and forcing the survivors to use their extremely limited supply of syringes.
After a two week siege the harmanz learned the Zamgrh cry that unites all forsaken.
Then came Caiger Mall. October 27, 2005. The third major mall siege since the game’s release. The outcome of the attack seemed certain.
For this defense, a group of humans calling themselves the Caiger Mall Survivors came together to finally create a permanent safe spot in Malton, knowing full well what they were up against. But the reward was worth the risk. In a way, what they were attempting was nothing less than re-establishing a small slice of civilization in Malton. What other goal is there for a Survivor?
They issued a declaration:
“No longer will humanity flee in the face of zombie hordes only to die another day. [...]
Come to The Mall. It’s where the action is.
We are the Caiger Mall Survivors. We’ve got your barhah right here.”
The Caiger Mall Survivors were joined for the battle by more than a dozen different groups. Alpha Elite Squad. Fire Brigade 47. The Malton Rangers. Many other sub-groups were there as well including “The Channel 4 News Team” whose members roleplayed that they were the characters from Anchorman, because it was 2005 and that’s just kinda what the internet was like back then.
Over a period of two weeks, the human allies built the consumerist shrine into a fortress while the Zombie mob outside grew larger every day, waiting to achieve the critical mass necessary to overwhelm the defense.
You are standing outside Caiger Mall, a narrow white-stone building riddled with bullet holes. The building has been extremely heavily barricaded.
Lights are on inside.
There is a dead body here.
Several different hordes were coming for what was expected to be the greatest feast in the game’s history. The Church of the Resurrection was here, a group formed on the joke that Jesus was the first zombie and they were following his example. The Undying Scourge was arriving as well, as were The Minions of the Apocalypse. None quite so numerous as The Many, the horde of Goons that organized on SomethingAwful.com.
The attack was led by a group called The Ridleybank Resistance Front (RRF) which gained infamy among the undead for overrunning a famed early Survivor enclave in the Ridleybank neighborhood and grew to become one of the largest hordes in Malton.
Their combined masses surrounded the building under command of the RRF’s leader, a Zombie named Petrosjko, and one of the most unique battles in online gaming history began to slowly unfold, 50 Action Points per day, each.
On November 25, the siege reached its peak as the Caiger Mall Survivors reported facing an historic horde - the largest ever assembled in Urban Dead - numbering 1300 players. The horde crashed and receded from the defenses over and over for weeks grunting “Hammarh zah barragagzh mah zambah brazzazz!” ("Attack the barricades, my zombie brothers!")
Occasionally the mob breached the walls, but Alpha Elite Squad and The Malton Rangers had strike teams stationed in nearby buildings that would rush in and kill the breaching Zombies who had just wasted all of their AP on the barricades.
The Zombies were making progress though. Slow as it was, that progress was beginning to pay off as more and more Zombies were attracted to the commotion at Caiger. The defense was fierce, but now Caiger was the biggest pinata in the history of Urban Dead.
Or, as one Zombie put it, “McBarhah Harmanbargarz.”
The infinite cycle of horror was yet unbroken, but a month into the Siege of Caiger Mall, the peak of the great contest, something happened that neither the Zombies nor the Survivors anticipated, and it changed the course of the battle and the history of Urban Dead:
Kevan changed the rules.
In the middle of the siege the game developer changed the find rate of Revivification Syringes from 5% to 15%. Suddenly, Scientists were no longer rushing each precious syringe to the front, instead they were able to stockpile reserves and resurrect anyone and everyone who wanted to be. In addition to being able to resurrect far faster than before, there were now so many needles left over that Scientists were brought to the front lines to use them offensively.
By now Survivors were well aware that killed Zombies would soon stand back up and resume their attack, but the humans discovered it actually slowed a zombie down more to be resurrected than to be killed. Since they couldn’t be killed permanently, the real enemy was their Action Points. So, rather than wasting time and bullets on the Zombies that managed to breach the barricades, the Scientists would instead dose them with a spare needle.
You stand up, a buzzing in your ears fading away as you do so. Adrenaline rushes unsteadily through your bloodstream.
The frustrated Zombie players would regain life and become weak Survivors without weapons or human skills. The players behind the characters were still loyal to barhah, but in order to rejoin their horde they would have to die.
You are inside Caiger Mall. Trails of looted debris litter the floors and escalators. The floor is slick with pools of blood.
A portable generator has been set up. It is running, and powering a radio transmitter that’s currently set to 26.43 MHz.
There are 428 other Survivors here.
There are 237 dead bodies here.
Somebody has spray painted ‘Hotdog Go To Bathroom’ onto a wall.
The fastest way to die was to use their fleshy human legs to run to a nearby building, jump out the window, and waste Action Points that would otherwise be used to break barricades and spread infection.
Are you sure you want to jump out of a window? This will kill you.
You fall heavily onto the pavement a few storeys below.
You are dead.
The exertions of the day have numbed your clouded brain. You stand where you were, swaying slightly.
When the Syringe patch was released, the undead lost critical mass within only a couple of days. All across Malton the number of Survivors started going up. The number of Zombies was going down. A bad sign for any apocalypse.
For the first time in years of attempts, the Survivors had been able to hold the mall, and the Zombie horde leader was gracious in defeat on the forums where they could speak in clear language.
Petrosjko
Subject: A salute to the Caiger Mall Survivors
(RRF announces defeat)
on: December 01, 2005, 02:30:21 PMLet none take away from what you have done here, and let none steal the credit for the valor of your defense. You have done what was thought to be impossible, for you have turned away the horde.
By December 2, the swarm was finally dispersed, and the Caiger Mall Survivors at last were able to see the gruesome sight that was left behind. The motionless bodies of more than 500 abandoned characters.
This was a curiosity to say the least, and ignited a flurry of accusations from both sides. When a player dies in Urban Dead they eventually gain the option to stand back up as a Zombie. They can move around, find a horde to follow or shamble over to a resurrection clinic.
These bodies were still here because these particular characters never chose to get up. A few character corpses were natural to see left behind as players who died might quit the game or roll a fresh Survivor character to avoid the drudgery of Zombie life. Five hundred of them, however, suggested something more coordinated.
The most likely explanation was that this was evidence of what gamers in this day would have called a “Zerger.” A player who illegally ran bot scripts to create and control large numbers of level 1 characters.
That this was evidence of a Zerging seemed obvious, but from which side? The blood-spattered corpses all looked the same in a pile. No way to identify which had been a Zombie or a Survivor during the siege. For all anyone knew both sides had contributed bodies to the mass grave.
With no way to identify a mastermind, the Survivors instead focused on memorializing their historic deed at Caiger Mall.
It’s occasionally challenging to understand exactly where the line between real and fiction lies in the story of Urban Dead, but according to the Caiger Mall Survivors, the following note was found on one of the bodies left in the pile named “Lt.Harris.” It reads:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw Zombies fall
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Caiger Mall
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though Zombies roam,
In Caiger Mall
As the hordes fell back to attack smaller forts and hideouts, the Urban Dead social ecosystem continued to evolve in response to the increased availability of syringes not just at Caiger Mall but all throughout Malton.
The result was game design disaster.
You can see the effects of the change in this graph which shows the population of Malton over time, split into Zombies and Survivors. The community started keeping track of this data for the first time specifically because of fascination with the Siege of Caiger Mall. Just weeks following the attack the graph showed there were now two Survivors for every Zombie in Malton.
The Zombies complained among themselves, but still shambled and moaned their way across Malton and tried their best to find stragglers and smaller Survivor hideouts to attack.
As discontent among the horde was growing, a new patch released on December 19, and when they saw how it would change the game the community was infuriated.
Kevan nerfed Zombies.
He was likely still in the process of implementing changes to curb the early power of dominant hordes. The game design had not anticipated outside agitators like The Many whose pre-existing social network allowed them to funnel thousands of people into the game.
Kevan had fallen behind on the state of the social system. While Zombies were once powerful, they were now outnumbered 2:1, and lacked all sorts of cool tools and toys available to Survivors like radios, cell phones, generators etc. Now things were going to get worse.
The nerf related to a Survivor skill called Headshot that was buffed so that Zombies killed by it were actually penalized and forced to spend extra Action Points to stand back up and continue zombing. It would’ve made a lot of sense just a couple months prior. The problem now was that this skill was so common that the number of Survivors with the Headshot skill actually outnumbered the total number of Zombies. In other words, every Zombie would be Headshot pretty much every encounter. It made playing a Zombie a miserable experience so fewer and fewer bothered. The marauding horde was reduced to a minor nuisance in a city suddenly awash in anti-barhah.
An in-game group called “On Strike!” was formed, and players were encouraged to join if they supported the cause, and they did by the hundreds. And not just Zombies, but Survivors as well who wanted this survival horror game to get back to being a game about, y’know, surviving.
A Survivor named ‘Andrew’ explained why this was a critical issue for Humans as well:
“I started my first character - a Private - back in August. I had the great misfortune of arriving in Shearbank.I moved into a [Police Department] and started searching when some [player named Wiley] started hitting me with an axe and telling me to get the hell out of Shearbank.
So I move east and get as far as Pimbank, where I am promptly eaten by a zombie horde called The Many.
This was my intro to UD at a time when fear dominated Malton - not boredom. In reality survivors outnumbered zombies even then, but the fear of a horde like The Many was enough to clear whole suburbs. [...]
The success of the hordes - limited in geographical terms - hid the fact that Zombies were declining.
The changes made to the game since August have (maybe as a reaction to the hordes) either helped survivors or proven to be pretty useless in game terms. Skills that made sense when humans were on the run made no sense once humans were numerically superior. [...]
This decline in the enjoyment of zombiedom reached its nadir at the battle of Caiger Mall. Initially the zombies seemed to have the upper hand, but the complete lack of a Zombie threat in most areas of Malton led to a huge in-pouring of survivors who wanted to experience a real zombie attack.
This in turn exposed the fact that many Zombies were just survivors looking for a revive (the 15% syringe search rate exposed that.) After Caiger there was no hiding that - as a zombie game - Urban Dead was broken. [...]
This is the genesis of the strike: the realisation that the game as a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ game was failing, and the memory that once Urban Dead was far more enjoyable than it is now.
On the day I joined the strike my survivor - armed with 8 revive syringes and 15 First Aid Kits, wandered across parts of three suburbs in NW Malton and found not a single injured survivor or any zombie needing a revive. Buildings were packed with survivors all on [full health points.]”
Hundreds joined the strikers, but not everyone agreed with the cause. Other groups were formed called ‘Strikers Go Home!,’ ‘Zombie Scabs,’ and ‘Pinkerton Detective Agency’ which declared themselves anti-protestor.
The anti-strikers weren’t very numerous, however, and so the peaceful mass at the protest continued to swell and reached nearly to the size of the Siege of Caiger Mall itself. Alpha Elite Squad figuratively joined hands with the Minions of the Apocalypse as brazzahs in barhah, and The Channel 4 News Team observed that the protest had escalated quickly.
Fortunately, the story of this apocalypse has a happy ending. Kevan heard their plea loud and clear, and within 24 hours began working to address the severe imbalance between humans and zombies.
“Hello,” wrote Kevan. “I was aware of and concerned by the imbalance in numbers, and correcting this was already the priority for future changes. There will be new game elements for zombies over the next couple of weeks, and keeping the game interesting for everyone (and within a zombie apocalypse genre) is very much the intention.”
Before long the gathering took on more the appearance of a party as the players reveled in the success of their political action, aware that a day of togetherness like this might never come again.
A Zombie could be heard singing:
Mah zambah brazzahz ahm nah-zahrh!zgz rab.
Gaa bra!ngrab zah baghgabz, an zah agzang mah zambah.
Mah zambah bra!ngrab gaa-grab ahm rhah mah zambah ahm bra!ngrab ah.
Gah !ahn grab zah grahm zamm agharh hazmanbagz.
I’ll leave this last translation for aspiring Zamgrh linguists.
Today, Urban Dead still exists and a few thousand players regularly log in. The players at the Siege of Caiger Mall went on to other adventures. Some had destinies that weren’t yet apparent, futures altered by their experience in the siege.
One Survivor in particular named RedZek0 came away from the experience with a plan to - as he saw it - repay the survivors for their efforts holding the mall. He was a Death Cultist who had not yet revealed himself, and he was now planning to gift fear back to the Survivors by plotting the largest mass murder in Malton’s history.
The protest and the events at Caiger Mall raised a number of fascinating questions, some exciting and some more concerning.
First and foremost, exactly whose game was this anyway? Did it belong to Kevan, for having written the code and maintained the servers? Did it belong to the players, without whose life force the game would have no purpose or value?
Did the players have a right to make demands of Kevan, simply because they had enjoyed his game thus far? Conversely, did he owe the players his labor out of obligation for their having given animus to a world that otherwise lived only in his imagination? Does a dev owe a community survival once they create it?
Or was this a case of out-of-control entitlement? Of players who wanted to resist change and try in vain to resurrect a lost era of the game that was never coming back? Did they have the right to hijack a free game in pursuit of barhah? Should we celebrate their success in doing so?
I have found that online gamers tend to find this story inspiring, while game developers see something more concerning.
There was also an issue of morality at stake in Malton. Who were the good guys here? Was it the Survivors who we’re told are good by the lore? Was it Kevan, the god himself toiling away to keep the community together?
And who represented evil in this place? Was it the zombies who presented as evil and whose barhah kept the Survivors in fear? But then, terror is what many Survivors wanted. In an apocalypse game wasn’t barhah ultimately a byword for healthy, cyclical community? And if barhah was essential to the health of the community then where was the line drawn in pursuit of it? Would the Death Cultists and Zergers be welcomed in “barhahraz,” (literally, “Barhah House”) the Zombie after-unlife? The Zombie factions could never agree on that one.
Perhaps it’s fair to say that what is good and evil is what both sides unanimously agree upon. Which was why it was so significant that the zombies and humans marched together, and that their detractors were so few. And yet it’s also clear that in this zombie apocalypse, peace was not a benign force. By creating peace the community was threatening to destroy itself and Kevan’s game.
After the days of the protest, the active player numbers of Urban Dead began to decline slowly and never recovered. A once thriving game slipped into a comatose apocalypse more bleak than the one it depicted. Few screams. No songs. No protests. Only crumbs left of the bread of barhah. Through to 2011 the game continued to bleed active players before arriving at a low plateau of a few thousand dedicated veterans where it remained until March 2025 when a new series of online laws in the UK forced Kevan to close the game for good.
Was it the Siege of Caiger Mall that broke faith in the balance? Was it the protest that broke the fiction of the game world? Or was this simply a social ecosystem beyond Kevan’s ability to govern as a lone unfunded indie developer?
The protest at the park is today perhaps the most important event that ever occurred in the game’s history. It was even celebrated by some Zombie factions as evidence that not all harmanz amh bahd. That some were even capable of joining the horde in the communal cry,
“Barhah!”