Footage of Irrational’s canned zombie apocalypse game

Last week, Irrational Games opened up their vault of secrets to show everyone Division 9, a canceled zombie shooter with heavily-borrowed elements from the SWAT series.

As hilariously fun as it sounds to take on zombies as a SWAT team, there were some legitimately neat ideas to be found — your allies could become infected, for instance.

Then-publisher Vivendi dug the idea for Division 9, so what went wrong? Irrational was acquired by Take-Two, which was all it took to prevent the concept from coming to fruition. On top of the in-game footage shown above, you can also check out the pitch for the shooter on the fancy Irrational site.

Had it come out according to schedule — before the recent onslaught of zombie games — I think it could have been a cool game for the time. Nowadays, though? I’m not so sure.

The Unliving Dead: Division 9 [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]