400,000 people flood GTA 5’s starting area in the first day of GTA Online’s new Left 4 Dead-style zombie mode

GTA Online players have waited a long time for two things in particular: some brain-munching zombies to fight and an official return to GTA 5’s starting area. Now that both promises have been fulfilled in the new Ludendorff Cemetery Survival mode, which came out on October 10, hundreds of thousands of players are flooding in. 

Rockstar Games announced the new mode last week, confirming that players would finally be able to return to North Yankton, which you might remember as the snow-covered town from GTA 5’s opening where Trevor and Michael rob a bank, murder a few policemen, and ruin their relationship for years.

GTA Online players weren’t actually able to explore the location without brute forcing their way in via glitches for years, since it’s somewhat disconnected from the open-world game’s main landmass, so this marks the first time people can freely go to North Yankton without the hassle. 

North Yankton plus zombies seems to have been a big enough deal for a whopping 400,000 GTA Online players to quickly jump into the mode within its first 24 hours, according to GTAO Stats. That number has rocketed passed the one million marks over the last few days, too.

Rockstar Games twitterer Tez2 noted that those player numbers are 270% higher than the crowd that showed up to GTA Online’s last big event, Assault on ATT-16. Maybe the wave-based survival mode gave enough people warm flashbacks to Left 4 Dead. Or maybe fans were craving undead baddies to blow up in a Rockstar game again after Undead Nightmare came out 14 years ago. Or maybe GTA is just that big.

 Why not check out everything we know about GTA 6 if you’re done with the undead?