I recently bought a copy of Tony Hawk's Underground 2. I was dissappointed when I found that it had conformed to the latest video-game trend: Putting zombies (remember knocking skulls off the five crypts in the Mardi Gras level?) in a non-horror game. I hope you can all join me in saying, "WTF, Neversoft?"

Zombies have been high up in popular media this year. A fair few movies/television programmes have featured them. I expect that the gaming industry wanted to ride this a little.

----
Slightly OT post:

I remember reading articles ten years ago about how some software companies had to change their games by removing humans from them, and replacing them with zombies or robots for the German market. This was in games like Carmageddon or similar, where humans were - if not actual targets - at risk of being killed for 'fun'. That's not to say that Germans didn't like human violence, just that the government was strict about what featured in popular media forms.

I don't know how true that is today, or whether it was back then.

---