ZombiU: Based on the Armageddon Prophecies of John Dee

by the Prophet, Andy W.

ZombiU releases exclusively for the Wii U next month, and is easily one of the most anticipated titles from the high-quantity, high-quality launch. Ubisoft have tasked some of their best developers to deliver a mature and unique take on the survival horror genre. One of the most exciting aspects of the game is that this isn’t just another zombie outbreak, Ubisoft have explored the prophecies of John Dee to produce a storyline with a lot of substance. Who is John Dee you ask?

Who Was John Dee?

John Dee was a Welsh astrologer, mathematician, navigator, occultist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He lived in London between 1527 and 1609 and devoted his life to the study of alchemy, divination and hermetic philosophy. He was a leader in his field and was not only invited to lecture advanced algebra at the University of Paris but also trained several of those famous figures who undertook England’s voyages of discovery to the Americas and all around the Pacific Ocean. He even coined the term “The British Empire” as the Queen’s empire grew throughout the world.

Dee was married twice and had eight children, one of which Katherine looked after Dee until his death in 1609. The first marriage only lasted 11 years as his first wife died. He didn’t marry again until he was 51 to the 23 year old Jane Fromond who died in the plague in 1603 along with several of his children. He was Christian, but his views were deeply influenced by Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines which claim that numbers are the basis for everything and even God’s creation was an act of numbering. He also believed the Hermetic view, that man had the potential for divine power.

During the last few years of his life, he tried to communicate with angels in order to learn about creation and bring about a pre-apocalyptic unity of mankind. He met Edward Kelley, a self-confessed spiritual medium to assist him in the undertaking of “angelic conferences”. He maintained that several of his books were dictated to him from angels in the “Enochian Language”, which they claimed was the first language of Jesus Christ. After several years Kelley became the most notable Alchemist of the pair and tried to break off the partnership to further his own career. Kelley tried to persuade Dee that one of the angels claimed they should share their wives, but it is thought that Dee agreed to this after much scrutiny.

About ten years after Dee’s death, antiquarian Robert Cotton bought land surround Dee’s Surrey home and instantly began excavating in search of unpublished papers and artefacts. He found several manuscripts from Dee’s angelic conferences and were published in 1659 as “A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for many Yeers between Dr.John Dee and some spirits”. The book proved very popular and sold extremely well. The scholar Meric Casaubon who helped publish the book claimed in the introduction that Dee was unwittingly the tool of evil spirits and helped give Dee the image of a deluded fanatic.

The Major Prophecies of John Dee

Some of John Dee’s Prophecies

• 1583 – England to be attacked by a foreign power. Queen of Scotland sentenced to death
• 1609 – His own death.
• 2010 – Chaos in the gulf, mass evacuations. Earthquakes, gradually increasing through to 2012.
• 2011 – Middle-East erupts into mass violence.
• 2012 – The Black Prophecy – Armageddon/Apocalypse. God reveals himself.

Some believe that John Dee’s date on the Armageddon is wrong and is not a pre-determined date, but only when one human manages to fully translate the entirety of the Enochian language. Many Christians believe that Armageddon will be a physical event such as nuclear war, an asteroid hitting the earth, the sun exploding or a plague/zombie outbreak. But it’s worth considering that angels are spiritual beings and not physical beings, so perhaps this Armageddon is the eradication of their religion?

ZombiU’s Background Story

ZombiU uses Dee’s prophecy of the Armageddon being a physical event – a Zombie outbreak on the city of London at the end of 2012. The game features a secret, and surely fictional, organisation called “The Ravens of Dee” who are researching his prophecies and trying to prevent them from occurring. At the start of the game, the player is ushered into an underground station by “the Prepper”, an ex-army no-nonsense man who foresaw the outbreak and took measures to survive. This underground station acts as your safe house where you can equip new items, and upgrade weapons.

ZombiU makes use of a feature called PermaDeath, meaning that if the player gets bitten by a Zombie once they will die and become a Zombie themselves, they will then re-awake as a new character in the underground station, and will then have to seek out their previous host and kill them to get back their survival pack or bug-out bag.

This bug-out bag is essentially your Wii U GamePad. As you look at your GamePad, your character on-screen will look into their backpack and still be susceptible to attack. You’ll be able to move items around, equip new weapons, items as well as check out some notifications. The game keeps track of your previous hosts, as they attack your online friends. Other uses for the GamePad include using the screen as the scope of a sniper rifle, keypad for unlocking doors and even for screwing in wooden planks across doors to slow down the incoming horde.

The game will release alongside the Wii U in North America on November 18^th 2012, Europe on November 30^th 2012 and Japan on December 8^th 2012. European gamers also have the chance to pick up an exclusive Wii U bundle featuring everything in the Premium Bundle plus ZombiU and a Pro Controller.

You can check out ZombiU screens in our gallery here!