Ever since Grand Theft Auto IV was released, it's included a viral infection gimmick based on one of the achievements. The "Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie" achievement is unlocked for anyone who kills one of the developers, or someone with the achievement. You then get to use the zombie player model if you want to run around multiplayer games in rotting skin and a yellow Speedo.

This isn't new. I'm sure there's some mathematical model for how quickly everyone would get this achievement, and it would indicate a date long ago. What is new is the GTA4section of Rockstar's Social Club where you can see a map of players with the achievement. It shows that pretty much everyone in the US, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have done this. Australia is close behind. Mexico is lagging. Spain, Italy, and one of those Scandinavian countries ("Hey, Swedes!") are way behind. The rest of the world apparently can't be bothered to play GTA4 multiplayer. You can even zoom in on a 50-state breakdown of the US, or arrange the data in charts. Cute, but useless.

So when Rockstar announced this feature with a blurb on their Social Club site, some folks got into a tizzy about the possibility of the upcoming downloadable content for GTA4 being some sort of zombie apocalypse add-on. Did you read that?

A zombie apocalypse add-on!

My first reaction was to run around the house screaming about how cool it will be to play a zombie apocalypse game in Liberty City. After I ran around my house for a while, I then went down the street to personally tell each of my neighbors. Then I came back home and told my copy of Dead Rising that I might have to take it down from the shrine to make room for someone else.

But as I was catching my breath from all the yelling, it occurred to me that there's no evidence this is anything other than a Halloween-themed plug for Rockstar's community site. It would be awfully cool if I'm wrong, but I think this is a matter of folks seeing what they want to see instead of taking an announcement at face value.

(No thanks to Rock8man for getting me all excited...)