Industry veteran Jeff Strain formed Undead Labs in November 2009 to develop a zombie MMO for consoles. After a little over a year, the studio has announced that its inaugural open world title will be a zombie-survival game published by Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox LIVE Arcade. This two-player game, which is codenamed "Class3," will actually kick off a zombie-filled franchise and pave the way for the future MMO.

Confused yet? Undead Labs describes their plans in more detail in a Q&A that was published to coincide with the announcement:

" ‘Class3′ is the codename for the ambitious zombie-survival open world game currently under development at Undead Labs for release as an Xbox LIVE Arcade title. ‘Class4′ is the codename for the subsequent zombie-survival online world game that we will develop by building on the Class3 platform. In other words, Class3 runs on your Xbox 360 and supports 1-2 players via Xbox LIVE or on the same screen, while Class4 will provide a much larger server-hosted world for thousands of simultaneous players."

Keep reading after the jump for more details.