Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000108 · Gaming → Sandbox games → Viral hits and cultural phenomena → Long-term early access development · 2013–2026
Project Zomboid
Zombie survival game in constant development since 2013
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“People have been buying this game since 2011, and its Wikipedia page still calls it upcoming.”
Why Noah kept it
The Indie Stone sold Project Zomboid unfinished on Desura from 2011, lost the code on two stolen laptops that year, and kept people paying and waiting through more than a decade of builds. Nothing in the Ark covers early access, so it goes in as a reference.
- In the Ark since
- 26 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.8 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 22.8 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Nomination on X · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Zomboid · nominated by someone
What it is
Project Zomboid is a sandbox survival game where players manage hunger, fatigue and stress while avoiding zombies in a fictional Kentucky zone. Developed by The Indie Stone, it entered early access on Steam in 2013 and remained in development for over a decade, becoming known for its extremely long pre-release cycle and incremental updates that kept players returning.
Why it’s internet culture
The game embodies a specific strain of early access culture where players accept indefinite development timelines and become invested in watching a game evolve incrementally. It shows how indie developers could maintain a dedicated audience for years without a finished product, and how players valued the process of development itself as part of the experience.
Project Zomboid shows players paying for a game years before it was finished and staying with it through a public, build-by-build development that ran for more than a decade. Following the updates became part of playing it.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2011 · The Indie Stone, sold as an unfinished game on Desura · Also known as Zomboid; PZ
- What it is
- Project Zomboid is a computer game made by The Indie Stone, a small British and Canadian studio. You play one ordinary person in a made-up corner of Kentucky in 1993, sealed off by the army after a zombie outbreak. You scavenge food, board up windows, read books to learn skills and try not to get bitten. A bite means death. The game tells you at the start that you will die, so the only question is how long you last.
- Where it came from
- The Indie Stone started selling an early test version in 2011, partly through Desura, an online shop for unfinished games that later went bust. That year two laptops holding the game's code were stolen in a burglary, and the team had to redo lost work. The game reached Steam, the biggest online games shop, as 'early access' in late 2013. That meant people paid for a game that was openly unfinished and got updates as they came. It grew slowly through word of mouth and people filming themselves playing it, then jumped in December 2021 when Build 41 added proper online multiplayer.
- Why it mattered
- It's one of the clearest cases of a game sold for years before it was finished, with players sticking around the whole time. Early access let small studios get paid while they built things, and let buyers watch the work happen in public. Project Zomboid is the version where that went on for more than a decade and mostly worked out: the game kept getting bigger, the studio survived, and it was still officially unfinished. For its players, waiting for the next build was part of owning it.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People were happy to pay for a game on the promise of what it would become, then spend years reading development blogs about it. For a lot of players, following the build numbers became a hobby in its own right, alongside actually playing.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.9 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.5 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (9.2 KB)
- Original
- 22.8 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.8 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.3 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.5 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 56.2% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,488 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,940 |
History
Kept
“The Indie Stone sold Project Zomboid unfinished on Desura from 2011, lost the code on two stolen laptops that year, and kept people paying and waiting through more than a decade of builds. Nothing in the Ark covers early access, so it goes in as a reference.”