The Many

	Historical Group
	This historical group is no longer active. However, its wiki page is preserved to reflect the group's significance in Urban Dead history.

The Many
Abbreviation:	None
Group Numbers:	50-300 (while active, currently apparently none)
Leadership:	?
Goals:	Survivor Extinction
Recruitment Policy:	?
Contact:	?

Historical Significance Section

The Many were a coordinated horde of zombie players that roamed the map in search of fresh brains to devour. Reports suggested that there were anywhere between 50 and 300 zombies in The Many, with the number and location wildly fluctuating from day to day.

Currently, it is believed that The Many, as well as the survivor group DARIS, which also drew its membership from the Something Awful forums, no longer exists, and its members have either left the game or dissolved in to existing groups. Due to The Many's clandestine nature, this can not be confirmed, but its activities have certainly decreased, with no major operations confirmed since The Siege of Giddings Mall.

The group's title is a reference to the zombie-like creatures of the hive-mind in the first-person-shooter RPG "System Shock 2", who refer to themselves as The Many.

Successful Attacks

The Many has claimed several successful attacks since its creation in mid-August 2005. Some of them include:

• The August 23rd attack on Retallick Walk Police Department in Millen Hills, where The Many killed more than thirty humans in a night.
• The August 25th attack on Rolls Road Police Department in Lamport Hills, where The Many killed more than eighty humans in a night.
• The August 28th attack on the suburb of Shearbank, where the entire suburb was ravaged within twenty-four hours.
• The September 9th attack on the Rowcliffe Building in Pegton, where The Many killed more than twenty-five humans in a night.
• The September 11th attack on Fennessy Place Police Department in Peppardville, where The Many killed more than thirty humans in a night.
• The September 13th attack on Marshment Place Police Department in Peppardville, where The Many killed more than fifty humans in a night.
• The September 17th attack on Chippett Grove Police Department, in which the entire population was wiped out.

Defeats

• On September 7th, a horde reported to number about thirty zombies, said by some to be The Many, attacked and was subsequently repelled from Giddings Mall. The PA Rebel Alliance, with help from The Pretorians, were occupying said mall at the time. Some controversy surrounds this event, with The Many denying this attack was an official operation of theirs. More information on this can be found at the Operation Windmill Scrotum controversy page.

• Beginning on September 19th, The Many began a siege of Giddings Mall, which was still primarily defended by the PA Rebel Alliance. A see-sawing battle continued for a couple of days, with the last major fighting apparently taking place on September 21st. After over a week of general inactivity by the zombies, the survivors claimed victory. More information can be found on The Siege of Giddings Mall page.

Disappearance

Following PARA's successful defense of Giddings Mall, the Many disappeared as they had arrived, quietly and with no explanation given. No official announcement has ever been made public, but it is generally believed that following this failed siege, players either left the game, began focusing on alternate characters (see: DARIS), or just played their zombie characters individually. Whether this defeat contributed to their disbanding, or if they were defeated at all, is denied by members who have spoken on the matter, and is the subject of some controversy that will likely not be resolved unless something else comes to light.

The advent of group-tracking statistics in November of 2005 show that no players of the game had laid claim to membership in The Many in their profiles. This is not, in and of itself, clear evidence that The Many have disbanded, but it fills out the picture of this group's inactivity.

Impact of The Many on Urban Dead Society

While subsequent groups have matched or surpassed The Many in terms of size or ability to inflict casualties, no group before or since has been able to capture the imagination and sow fear in the community as The Many did. So effective were they in this, to this day, survivors who do not frequent the Urban Dead forums are likely to misidentify any large zombie horde as the Many. Almost a month after their last verifiable operation, survivors inside Fort Creedy under siege by several hundred zombies were quoted saying, "No wonder they call them the Many. There's so many of them." However, even for those familiar with the community, the Many are widely considered to be the standard against which all other current zombie hordes are measured, much like DARIS and the CoL are still the end-all, be-all of survivor groups.

This is likely not a coincidence. As one forum member put it, what does The Many have that other groups don't? "Style. ****ing style." The Many was able to manipulate the paranoia of the survivor populations through well-coordinated, surprise attacks that caused panic because the defenders did not know who source of the attack was, where they had come from, or where they were going next. The faceless nature of the group coupled with a string of stunning successes made them less of a player group, and more of a force for survivors in safehouses across the city to endlessly speculate about while they worried over who the Many's next target might be.

A separate, non-exclusive hypothesis, is that The Many was simply the first zombie group to be considered a true horde. After all, even though most survivors now know that the members came from the Something Awful forums, their legacy has not diminished because of it. Because they were first, because they had so much success so early in the game, they became the measuring stick, in the same way Babe Ruth is the measuring stick of baseball players, despite most of his records being surpassed. Some players believe that a significant amount of Urban Dead's popularity is due to The Many, who came at a time in the game's history when zombies were otherwise disorganized and considered underpowered. They showed just how effective organized zombie groups could be against large survivor populations, and perhaps helped to inspire the creation of and participation in large scale and organized zombies, if only to prove that other groups could do it better.

The Many were also mentioned (along with the Vengabeans) in an article about Urban Dead in the November issue of PC Gamer UK as well as the January edition of PC Gamer US:

The Many are the main cause of fear in the city of Malton. Some reports put their numbers as few as fifty but, in a place of fear, the voices that whisper "there's three hundred of the bastards" are more listened to. The zoms attack like rotting locusts, tearing down barricades in minutes and devouring all within. People say they ravaged the entire suburb of Shearbank in 24 hours. They say that when the defenses went down at the Rolls Road Police Department over Lamport Hills, they killed 80 people in a long black night. And they say that they got a whupping when they tried to take the Giddings Mall, but most seem to think that was just wishful thinking.

The effect of The Many was and is in many ways much greater than the number of safehouses cracked and survivors killed.