The Blackest Night DLC for NetherRealm Studios’ upcoming DC Comics fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us serves as both a handy comic book tie-in and an excuse to add zombies to the game.
Zombies have been over since well before the Call of Duty games dropped a bunch of dumb AI spawns into a small area and called it a brand new game mode. Yet people keep clambering for more rotting corpses, so who are game developers to deny them the sweet, clammy embrace of the ambulatory dead?
That’s how we segue into an explanation of why Batman is suddenly a zombie in the trailer above. The video comes from Amazon’s German wing, where the Blackest Night DLC is now listed as a pre-order incentive for those deutschlanders willing to drop €95 on the Injustice: Gods Among Us Collector’s Edition package. While the clip is in German, you don’t need to speak the language to see what you’d be getting from this DLC: new, undead costumes for each of the game’s characters, as well as some kind of special new gameplay mode directly linked to the undead theme.
Okay, so you’re vaguely interested and clinging to the idea that this DLC will eventually be released in English. The good news is that it almost certainly will, but that doesn’t really answer the question of why NetherRealm has decided that its videogame about Superman punching Catwoman into the stratosphere needed zombies. Fortunately, that’s a surprisingly easy question.
In 2009 DC Comics ran a big comic book event dubbed “Blackest Night.” You don’t need all the details (but can find them on the DC Comics Database), as the important bits boil down to “the death-obsessed Black Lanterns emerged, a ton of people died, were resurrected in zombie-esque form, and at the end of the series the status quo was basically restored.” The event fleshed out the concept of the Black Lanterns (think: Green Lantern but really morbid), and even momentarily gave Batman a set of superpowers that could best be described as “Christ-like,” but in the end the only thing anyone really remembers about the event is that it featured a bunch of superhero zombies. Hence the DLC and the new costumes.
As for when/if the Blackest Night DLC might make its way out of Germany, that’s still unclear. We’re positive it will happen, as it makes absolutely no sense for NetherRealm Studios to build this DLC with only the German market in mind, but until we hear something official, we just don’t know if it will be winging its way across the Atlantic. Injustice: Gods Among Us is slated to hit store shelves on April 16, so hopefully we’ll know more by then.
Via Polygon
