Eruptive Games, a Vancouver-based developer that’s shortly set to launch a zombie-killing game called Citizen Grim, just picked up $1 million in funding. Investors include Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook’s first 10 employees, Guitar Hero creator Kai Huang and Nadeem Kassam of Zynik. A Russian social game developer called Plarium is also putting funding in and will act as an adviser. Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang is also an adviser.
Like Kixeye and Kabam, Eruptive isn’t targeting casual gamers, but rather more hard-core players. These types of games may not attract the sheer number of users that Zynga games might, but they can monetize far better because they attract a more selective audience that is more willing to pay for items in games.
Their forthcoming title Citizen Grim is an RPG arcade game. The plot is about a medical experiment that went wrong in 1945 in the Nevada desert. In the game, the U.S. government had been working on a solution to help fix military personnel who had come back from World War II. They ended up creating a facility to host all of their experiments called GRIM.
The town around the facility grew to the point where it ended up being 20,000 people. In the story, something with GRIM’s experiments goes terribly wrong and all 20,000 citizens turn into something like zombies. They’re called “reapers” in the game.
“You’re one of the last survivors and you have to fight yourself out of the town,” said chief executive Julian Ing. “That’s what makes it super fun.”
The company’s working with an unnamed publisher to bring it out soon. Then it should come out on mobile devices in September or October. Eruptive’s previous title Mercenaries of War hit a peak of 1 million players and monthly actives of about 500,000.