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

A woman with a bloody mouth and floppy hat — (Image credit: Brigada Games)

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.

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.

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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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