10 Crazy Video Game Spin-Offs You Won't Believe Exist

9. The Typing Of The Dead

Typing of the Dead
SEGA

For a second, just imagine that original meeting where The Typing Of The Dead was pitched. "Okay, so instead of shooting the zombies, let's make players type out words to kill them instead!" It's a bonkers idea on paper, but the result is actually a really fun alternate version of the base game.

A spin-off of Sega's The House Of The Dead series, the smartest thing that The Typing Of The Dead did was that it didn't reduce that inherent feeling of pace and urgency. It's not like you're stopping for five minutes at a time while you figure out a tough word puzzle: you're still on-rails, you're still moving through the level quickly, and you're spelling pretty basic words that don't require much thought or patience.

The result is a wonderfully peculiar cross between horror and humour (in what other game is the phrase "testosterone production" even remotely useful?), one that proved so popular that it made the jump from arcade cabinet to home console in the early 2000s, and was even ported to iOS in 2012.

Sidenote: that iOS version was called "Flick Of The Dead", but shouldn't it really have been called "Tapping Of The Dead"? Are we gong crazy here?!

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!