Zombies!!! is a tile-based strategy board game for two to six players. Zombies!!! won the 2001 Origins Award for Best Graphic Presentation of a Board Game, and Zombies!!! 3: Mall Walkers won 2003's Origins Award for Best Board Game Expansion.
Zombies!!! is an homage to zombies in fiction, particularly the zombie films of George A. Romero and Sam Raimi. The shambling movement of the zombies as compared to the players and the relative ease with which they are dispatched makes them weak enemies individually, but (as in the films) they are strong in large numbers.
Players must decide whether to avoid combat and allow the other players to dispose of the zombies for them, or to strike out and collect the various items that the board and event cards provide. Once the Helipad tile is placed, the players can choose between racing to the helicopter (which will often result in death); holding back and hoping to rush in when another player dies; or ignoring the helipad entirely and trying to kill 25 zombies.
A zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is a fictional undead being created through the reanimation of a human corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, where a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but often invoke science fictional methods such as radiation or viruses.
The English word "zombie" is first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi". The Oxford English Dictionary gives the origin of the word as West African, and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish).
One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929. This is the sensationalized account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls. Time claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".
"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish rock band The Cranberries. It was released in September 1994 as the lead single from their second studio album, No Need to Argue (1994). The song was written by the band's lead singer Dolores O'Riordan, and reached No. 1 on the charts in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany.
It won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards.
Zombie was written during the Cranberries' English Tour in 1993, in memory of two boys, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, who were killed in an IRA bombing in Warrington.
The Rough Guide to Rock identified the album No Need to Argue as "more of the same" as the Cranberries' debut album, except for the song "Zombie", which had an "angry grunge" sound and "aggressive" lyrics. The Cranberries played the song on their appearance on the U.S. show Saturday Night Live in 1995 in a performance that British author Dave Thompson calls "one of the most powerful performances that the show has ever seen".