Fans of The Walking Dead who also play the official mobile game, No Man’s Land, can now unlock weekly content that directly ties into the already shocking seventh season. In a real-time partnership between developer, Next Games and AMC, fans will be able to unlock exclusive weekly content in the game that features new playable characters as they appear on the show bonus themes, special cuts and behind-the-scenes videos.
The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land launched last year and has since been downloaded nearly 15 million times. Players are challenged to survive the zombie apocalypse by maintaining a camp, gathering supplies and battling both “walkers” and other people what want what you have. The game ties directly into the show with official characters like Michonne, Daryl, Rick, Carol and more and features touchscreen, turn-based combat.
“A game and a TV show have never been integrated in quite this way before, and we owe it to all the incredible support The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land received during its first year,” said Teemu Huuhtanen, CEO of Next Games in a statement.
The first unlockable content was made available on Monday following the horrifying season seven premiere of The Walking Dead, taking advantage of the social media storm that followed. The bloody season opener was seen by 17 million viewers—16 percent more than last year’s debut (14.6 million) and on par with the Season 5 premiere (17.3 million). Aftershow The Talking Dead, broadcast live in the famous Hollywood Forever cemetery, scored its largest audience ever at 7.6 million viewers. A sponsored Twitter hashtag featuring Negan’s baseball bat named Lucille, also served to keep the conversation going through the week.
The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land stays true to the nature of the TV show through hard decisions and even tougher situations, but now fans can play as Negan, a bit of therapy may be in order. “The great thing about Negan is we’ve seen bad guys at Terminus and we’ve seen The Governor,” David Alpert, CEO and co-founder of Skybound Entertainment told [a]listdaily. “They’ve been seriously bad and they’ve done horrible things, but they’ve always been on a size of scale that you can wrap your heads around.”
One thing fans have learned about Robert Kirkman’s franchise—no character is safe, a fact literally beat into viewer’s brains on Sunday by the brutal execution of a couple fan favorites. “The truth is, when we start the year nobody has to survive,” explained Alpert. “Everybody is on the table. If somebody was to come in the room with a pitch that was incredibly compelling as to why we write-off one of the leads, we’d take it on.”
