This was originally developed as a single-player PC game called Day of the Zombie, which had a four month development cycle and was ready for an October 2004 release. Day of the Zombie was shown to Universal Studios around the time the movie Land of the Dead (2005) was being filmed in Toronto, Canada (where Groove is headquartered) - this is how the license was secured. The game was ported to Xbox, multiplayer functionality was added and environments were added to tie the game to the movie.