Death sentence
I previously wrote about learning to touch type during the pandemic, after decades of what could only be described as ‘advanced poking’. Since then, I finished the whole Typing Club curriculum and spent the last 3 years practising every day through my day job. My rough envelope maths suggests I’ve deliberately practised touch typing for more than 6000 hours; I’m a ten-fingered blur now, accurately typing at around 80-90 WPM. (Having the right tool helps.)
Yet what use is writing quickly if you’re not writing anything? In 2024, I’m building a new daily writing habit1. Fittingly for an essay about The Typing of the Dead, I found these notes in my graveyard of unfinished writing and turned them into a full essay. I will leave you to determine whether they should have remained buried.
Sega’s moonshot
The Sega Dreamcast is delightfully quirky. It came at the end of Sega’s hardware career after the failure of the Saturn. While I love the Saturn – it’s still hooked up to my TV and it gets some playtime – it’s a deeply flawed system from design to execution, which deserved defeat at the hands of the PlayStation.
Dreamcast was Sega’s moonshot, one last attempt to regain the market share it lost to Sony and Nintendo in the 32-bit generation. With the threat of the PlayStation 2 looming, Sega focused on some key learnings from Saturn: where Saturn was complicated to manufacture2 and program, Dreamcast used off the shelf parts and was compatible with Windows (yuck!) CE for application development. Dreamcast was the first console with an integrated modem, building on Sega’s experimentations with Saturn Netlink.
Dreamcast couldn’t compete with the PlayStation 2 specs – real or imagined3 – on raw computing performance, which mattered much more in 1998 than in 2023; so they added fun differentiators like the Visual Memory Unit, a memory card with an LCD screen that could play mini games. The VMU was a neat idea (which Sony quickly ripped off with their PocketStation) but as no Dreamcast owner will ever forget, the VMU ran off two lithium coin cell batteries. After quickly draining those batteries, it would alert you with a high-pitched shriek every time you powered on the Dreamcast. Lovely.
Quirky hardware aside, the real innovation of Dreamcast came from games like Crazy Taxi, Chu Chu Rocket, Jet Set Radio, where Sega’s development teams seemingly threw every idea at the wall later in its lifecycle to see what would stick. These are bizarre games with a bright, blue-skied arcade influence and a winking, self-deprecating personality: silly games that know they are silly games. Often, even if a Dreamcast game is self-serious, it’s still inherently ridiculous: Sega’s classic cetacean simulator Ecco the Dolphin returned in Defender of the Future, with somehow even more arcane lore and a harder difficulty than the notoriously obtuse Mega Drive games.
In Europe we didn’t get some of the truly weird shit like Segagaga, a Sega simulation role-playing game, or Seaman, a half-fish-half-human Tamagotchi game controlled through a microphone. I haven’t played either of these, but the screenshots are baffling enough. Another of these weird games is The Typing of the Dead.
How could anyone do this?
Dreamcast’s European launch games included Sonic Adventure, serviceable arcade ports (Virtua Fighter 3TB, Sega Rally 2), and two better-than-arcade masterpieces: SoulCalibur and The House of the Dead 2.
House of the Dead 2 is a drop-dead classic. It’s one of the best light gun games ever made. It’s an action-packed romp with wonderful set pieces and imaginative monster and boss designs, multiple paths to discover and explore, and a decent challenge. It’s also delightfully camp with some of the worst voice acting ever recorded4 – “Don’t come! Don’t come!” – and it hints at the ‘Weird Sega’ future of the Dreamcast with goofy training missions and other additions to the arcade formula.
Light gun games are a forgotten genre these days, except for that sticky Time Crisis cabinet in the corner of your local bowling alley. The old console guns rely on CRT televisions and can’t be used on modern LCDs; emulating a gun with a Wii Remote (another relic of a bygone era!) doesn’t have the same responsiveness for a shooter. I played through some Wii games at the end of 2023, and the aiming in slower games like Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime 3 is excellent (although I had forgotten about the remote-waggling that plagued Wii games which, combined with Resident Evil 4’s penchant for QTEs, made RSI a greater threat to my life than the Ganados5). House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return , in contrast, has a lagging sluggishness to the aiming, ill-suited to the twitchy, reactive gameplay. Despite their plodding reputation, these zombies need only milliseconds to feast on your brains. You need to shoot quickly, and let’s be honest, often from memory.
As if House of the Dead 2 wasn’t goofy enough, Sega went one better with The Typing of the Dead. The guns are replaced by keyboards – literally, the main characters have keyboards in front of them and Dreamcasts strapped to their backs – and the quick shooting is replaced by rapid-fire typing tests that would challenge Mavis Beacon herself. It’s somehow exactly the same game as House of the Dead 2 – same enemies, same levels, same voice acting – and yet fundamentally different. Sega released this game in arcades and the cabinet is perfect:
At this point you may be thinking one of two things: “how do you play a typing game on a console?”, and/or “why does this game exist?” The Dreamcast came with a keyboard peripheral – I owned one for chatting in Phantasy Star Online – but The Typing of the Dead was never released in Europe. Even if it had been released, my two-fingered pecking at the keys wouldn’t have been enough to save me from the zombie hordes feasting on my brains.
Luckily for me, The Typing of the Dead was released for PC and is now ‘freely’ available as abandonware. Now it is 2024, and I am not a teenage typist: I am a fully-grown, fully trained keyboard warrior. Now I am ready.
What the hell’s going on in this city?
The Typing of the Dead starts simply enough: zombies appear, a phrase appears above their head, and you need to type those letters to shoot at them. Bats and projectiles can be swatted away with a single letter. The stronger a zombie is, the longer the phrase: at first, just a word (like ‘groupie’ or ‘ping-pong’), with complexity increasing on later levels. Tougher zombies require multiple phrases, and bosses need volleys of whole sentences to take them down. You’ll need to be fast and accurate to survive.
You type increasingly convoluted and hilarious phrases, with some whimsy and imagination thrown in. The ‘Tower’ boss, basically a five-headed hydra, turns into a trivia game: you need to type the phrase that matches your answer. For example, you might be asked “which one is a tasty beverage?” with the options of “soda pop”, “juicy larvae”, and “nostril oil”. Most of the bosses are a fierce test of fast typing, especially the Magician. If you weren’t already a fast touch typist, you will become one in completing this game.
There’s not a whole lot more to say: you type, zombies die. It’s the inherent silliness of House of the Dead in a more explicitly ridiculous package, and it’s brilliant.
Suffer like G did?
My touch typing training prepared me well for the zombie hordes. I played through The Typing of the Dead in a single session without reaching a game over, although I was cutting it fine on the later bosses. If you know how to type, there’s very little additional skill required beyond those basics. You don’t even need to prioritise your typing targets. In that sense, The Typing of the Dead is similar to a rhythm action game – albeit with far fewer keys than a Rock Band pro controller – where its hardest gameplay is fundamentally the same as its easiest, just fiddlier.
Learning to touch type is initially a slow process, because you learn row by row. You need to learn all three rows of the alphabet —unless you’re writing about a glad fad sad dad had — before you can type whole sentences, and then everything you type becomes touch typing practice, so you can quickly build up speed.
The Typing of the Dead includes typing drills, but I was a proficient touch typist before I started and so I’m not sure if they really help improve your typing. I think playing through it improved my speed and finessed some sloppier aspects of my typing: there’s no backspacing your way out of typos when a zombie is eating your face.
The Typing of the Dead brings back the halcyon days of Sega, when games had a goofy sense of humour to go alongside the challenge that few games have emulated, save for perhaps God Hand. You probably shouldn’t learn to touch type specifically to play The Typing of the Dead, but it’s a fundamental skill for anyone who uses a computer for their job. And if you’re going to learn to type, you might as well laugh while you learn.
- 100 words a day for the past 102 days at the time of editing this! ↩
- Saturn had two processors and two video coprocessors, allegedly because Sega saw the PlayStation specifications, realised it was way ahead of Saturn, and doubled everything. True? Not sure. A great story? Absolutely. ↩
- I vaguely remember the marketing claims that PS2 would be powerful enough to render Toy Story in real time. Sony bullshitted their way through the PS2 and PS3 era; they’re a little more honest these days ↩
- I can’t believe this website still exists, late 90s design and everything. What a treasure ↩
- This isn’t really a joke – take care of your computer ergonomics and get professional support! ↩