400,000 people flood GTA 5’s starting area in the first day of GTA Online’s new Left 4 Dead-style zombie mode
North Yankton has its fans, I guess
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GTA Onlineplayers 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 toGTAO Stats. That number has rocketed passed the one million marks over the last few days, too.
Rockstar Gamestwitterer Tez2notedthat 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 6if you’re done with the undead?
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
Former GTA 6 designer says the open world sequel will “blow people away” and “people will be talking about it for ages” because Rockstar has “raised the bar again”
After 3 years, GTA 5 on PC is finally getting upgraded to match current-gen consoles in 2025
In a first for Dragon Age, The Veilguard director reiterates the RPG won’t have DLC as BioWare pivots to work on Mass Effect 5
