Quarantine Zone was almost a zombie-free sim about managing a warehouse

Something curious happened in mid-2024: everyone went crazy over a little game called Supermarket Simulator. There's never a shortage of quirky little games about doing real-life jobs, but for some reason this particular retail sim about stocking shelves and waiting on customers blew up big—and that didn't just draw the attention of players, but other developers.

That includes Stas Staryk, who had been doing corporate VR training and outsourced work for Epic Games, but wanted to make his first game with the company he'd co-founded, Brigada Games. A game like Supermarket Simulator had a lot of appeal, Staryk told PC Gamer this week.

"We decided that it's interesting to try our first game in this [simulator] genre, because it's not so expensive in development [and] it has a pretty large audience," Staryk said. "I think we tried two ideas. The first was 'Warehouse Manager.'"

His team put together a mock-up trailer of what a warehouse management game might look like and received positive feedback from Reddit and Discord. Ultimately, though, Staryk decided to go another route with Brigada's first game, thinking there were too many warehouse-style sims already coming out.

"And actually it was true, because one month later, Storage Guys was announced [and] they used the same assets we used in our trailer," Staryk said.

Next, the devs considered making an alchemist simulator, Staryk said, due to his personal interest in "real alchemists, not fantasy alchemists, but the real Middle-Ages alchemists," he said. "How they lived, what they did. They were the first scientists."

Another concept trailer was made, but the alchemy simulator idea was eventually scrapped. "It looked too complex for us, for our first game."

The team moved onto the next idea: zombies. "I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead universe," Staryk said. Still wanting to stick with a simulation game but incorporate the undead, Staryk says one of the developers at Brigada Games suggested "something like Papers, Please and zombies," and the idea for Quarantine Zone: The Last Check was finally born.

Pivoting to a zombie theme appears to have been a great idea: Quarantine Zone now has over a million wishlists on Steam and a publishing deal with Devolver Digital. Ironically, if there's one thing players don't like about the demo, it's the warehouse management aspect of it: everyone hates the wonky supply cart you have to push around, so ditching the Warehouse Manager concept was probably a wise move.