Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Hello again! Thank you for checking in. It’s great to see you.

My final Ninja Turtles stream was 22 days ago. Barring something unforeseen, my first Zombies stream will be in two days, on 9/18.

I will be running the 100% category of the game. In the context of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, this means saving all 10 of the neighbors in each of the 55 levels. This is a feat that I’ve never actually done. I have practiced each level in isolation in preparation for these attempts, but there’s so much luck involved with this run, I want to do all of my attempts live, just in case.

I am not anticipating finishing a run on my first day. Once one of your neighbors dies in this speedrun, the run is over. It’s a strange run in that sense. Actually completing a run is a feat in itself, regardless of your time. This is reflected on the leaderboards. There are 20 speedrunners with times on the leaderboard of the any% category of Zombies Ate My Neighbors. For 100%, there are only three total runs. For more context, Ninja Turtles has a 35-person leaderboard for the category I was playing.

This run is also pretty long. The Ninja Turtles world record is 18 minutes and 41 seconds. The Zombies Ate My Neighbors world record is 1 hour, 13 minutes and 59 seconds.

For those wondering why I chose to play Zombies Ate My Neighbors as my next game, it has always been a favorite of mine. It’s a very tough game to actually beat. I could never beat it as a younger kid.

In the summer of 2006, now older and having graduated from high school, I remember finding a run of Zombies Ate My Neighbors by a user named Gia. It was on Youtube. It was before you could make youtube videos longer than 10 minutes, so it was one run that was cut each time it hit the 9:59 mark. Old school Youtube memories :)

Anyway, Gia managed to save every single neighbor in the game. I was floored by this. I suppose it was a ‘speedrun’, but at this point of my life, speedruns didn’t conceptually exist yet.

I was compelled to learn this run that Gia had pulled off. Still in 2006, I learned the strategies for all 55 levels by watching Gia’s Youtube 1.0 videos. There were some things I couldn’t figure out on my own, some strategies I couldn’t replicate exactly. I was never able to save all of the neighbors back in 2006, but I was able to take runs deeper into the game before losing my first neighbor than I ever had before. Most notably, for the first time in my life, I could consistently beat this game.

I didn’t keep up with Zombies Ate My Neighbors speedrunning at all after that. I was shocked and incredibly happy when I went to the speedrun.com leaderboards and saw that the user Gia has a run from 2008 that currently ranks as #12 on the any% category leaderboards. It doesn’t look like he’s active in any way today, but really amazing to see this old name again.

While learning the run in preparation for this week’s streams, I could remember some of those old Gia strats from 2006. I would learn a level, and the far corners of my brain would remember that this is exactly how I used to do it back in the day. Tons of the strategies used today are the exact same ones I watched and learned back in 2006 from Gia’s videos. He was way, way, WAY ahead of his time.

One of the great things about speedrunning is the way that the past survives into the present. As far as I can tell, Gia stopped speedrunning 16 years ago. With only three runs on the 100% leaderboards, it’s not everyday that Gia’s old 100% strategies get to see the light of day.

During Fall 2024, Gia’s 2006 strats will live again. The muscle memory he developed in 2006 when he saved all the neighbors is starting to solidify within me. I am blessed to have the time and space to dedicate to this project, and I’m excited to get going. It’s never too late to save all the neighbors. Let’s do this.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Pancake - always ready to help me learn new speedruns <3