To survive in the world of The Walking Dead, you have to be smart, skilled, and swift. And as Hyundai’s The Walking Dead Chop Shop app shows, it doesn’t hurt to have a sweet and deadly set of wheels to drive around and through herds of walkers. Derek Arzoo, the Associate Creative Director for Hyundai’s The Walking Dead Chop Shop, launched a website that features intriguing looks at what went into making the popular app and its related materials.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Hyundai’s The Walking Dead Chop Shop is a free app in which users build the ultimate survival machine out of three Hyundai vehicles and over 900 parts. At your disposal are machine guns, blades, barbed wire, and much more: think the kinds of vehicles that prowled the landscapes of The Road Warrior and Doomsday. The challenge is to create a zombie survival machine with the highest survivability percentage, currently held by Justine E.’s ride “Zosimos” (you get to name your vehicle) at 91%. Your zombie-proof ride has to be fast, protected, and able to kick ass.

This is a popular app, and the 250,000+ zombie survival machines built so far attest to that. You can find out how the project was born and nurtured to the full-grown app it has become on Arzoo’s website:

Created by Arzoo and more than twenty others, The Walking Dead Chop Shop project went beyond the digital environment of the app. Arzoo and others crafted a manual for an Elantra Coupe with zombie survival modifications, a manual straight out of the world of The Walking Dead (although no characters from the comic or show appear in it). As Arzoo states on his website, the idea for the manual was “…to emulate your dad’s Haynes car manual with a zombie twist. Need to survive? Here is the car to do that.” In addition to focusing on the car, the manual also tells a horror story of a Hyundai engineer preparing for the zombie swarm to crash down on humanity. To ensure the manual’s collectible value, Arzoo proposed a run of only 500 books. The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman even signed twenty of them. They are currently available on eBay.

On his site, Arzoo reveals fun facts from all stages of the manual’s creation, such as how he researched the weathered texture, vintage look, and sinister sketches in old books like the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis that appeared in Evil Dead II. Coupled with Arzoo’s entertaining and informational entries on the app and manual’s history are photos and even some video footage pertaining to the project’s creative process.

So if you’re interested in learning more about Hyundai’s The Walking Dead Chop Shop app, Arzoo’s site is the place to go. Be sure to fasten your seat belts, though, because a ride in the zombie apocalypse is almost sure to be a bumpy one.

For more behind the scenes information from Arzoo, visit: http://zombiesurvivalmachine.com/

To download the app and view the highest-rated zombie survival machines, visit: http://walkingdeadchopshop.com/

*This story was submitted by Derek Anderson

  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.