Zombie Playground: The Goonies and Attack the Block with a splash of The Walking Dead

It all started with that image.

In the painting we see tiny children armed with children's toys and the oddments of a school playground. One is holding a trashcan lid like a shield, the other threatens with a school-house-red brick. They hold a Wiffle Ball bat, maybe a measuring stick, as weapons. The four stand crowded in a chipped and scratched jungle gym. One boy prods a zombie slithering up the curve of a yellow slide, the boy's small frame silhouetted against the fluff of white clouds in an incongruously pretty blue sky. A little raven-haired girl stands with one foot balanced on a yellow railing, mouth agape, slingshot gripped in a diminutive hand.

That there are four children surrounded by a horde of the young undead, that the painting was noticed shortly after Valve's Left 4 Dead was released, led some to believe that the piece of art was meant to be an homage.

But Chan says it wasn't.

"The image was originally created for an art contest with the theme ‘outbreak,'" he told Polygon. "A lot of people were going to go the zombie route, but I wanted to do something a little different. Then I had the idea that maybe all of the zombies and survivors should be kids. From there, the image pretty much painted itself. All I had to do was imagine what I would do as a kid to survive a zombie outbreak.

"I used to play games like this with my friends all of the time on the jungle gym at school. When I started thinking about how kids would react in this situation, all of those childhood memories came flooding back. It's as much an autobiographical piece as it is a zombie apocalypse painting."

Zombie Playground was a "fun image to make," Chan said, but he never really expected it to become anything more than that. Then it was discovered on Digg, and sites like Kotaku wrote about it and suddenly people were drawing parallels between it and Left 4 Dead.

This isn't the first time Massive Black decided to do more than breath life into other people's ideas. Before there was Jason Chan's Zombie Playground there was Peter Konig's Mothhead.

Konig's work as an artist, sculptor and puppeteer has shown up in a number of surprising places. Movies: Arachnophobia, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Child's Play 3,Star Trek IV, Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers. Video games: Left 4 Dead, DOTA 2,Portal 2 and Halo 4. The lists go on and on.

The sculptures found on his website show deformed, faceless people, grey, stripped of identity, often headless. Next to a sculpture of what looks like a handless, stooped figure with wild tufts of grass growing out of its neck - above the sculpture of the bunny-eared mummy, its hands missing, its legs shriveled to sticks - stands Mothhead. As a sculpture, Mothhead borders on vulgar. Perhaps that was the goal: a model that deconstructs the human form and reshapes it into something repulsive. A massive pointed bone curves upward out of Mothhead's crotch. The nubby arms end at the elbow, rags hanging in tatters almost to the ground. A cage of exposed ribs wrap around the gaunt torso. A twisted root of a neck ends with the flat disc of a perched moth. Ironically, Mothhead seems to become more substantial when he moved from the form of a physical sculpture to that of concept art, and then finally a video game of sorts.

The sculpture made the leap to interactivity, populating a "world where your head is a moth," to help show off the prowess of a video game engine. But it wasn't released to the public.

"Mothhead is really a tech demo done in collaboration with Unity Technologies and is meant to show off Unity 3D's high-quality rendering capabilities, effects, and HDR," Hatala explains. "Unity is a great engine, and one that is certainly a contender in creating AAA quality games. We're not sure if/when Unity will decide to releaseMothhead, but maybe someday we will add a bit more gameplay and release a Massive Black version free to the public."