Could a Zombie Train Actually Work in Real Life?

Every Call of Duty Zombies player knows the move: gather the horde, run a big circle, survive forever. But those are 24 human-sized bodies sprinting shoulder to shoulder. So I pulled the real numbers out of Treyarch's own game scripts, built a crowd-crush physics simulation, and found out what a zombie train would really look like. Spoiler: it's not a train. 0:00 The question 0:35 Measuring the game (straight from the code) 1:50 How zombies chase you (the dog and the duck) 2:49 Bodies take up space 3:40 The inside lane 4:15 Somebody falls 5:03 How big does the circle need to be? 5:51 The answer Sources: Black Ops 1 & 2 zombies scripts (decompiled, Plutonium t5/t6-scripts), Treyarch Black Ops 3 mod-tools scripts, World at War dvar dump (UGX-Mods) Helbing, Farkas & Vicsek (2000), "Simulating dynamical features of escape panic", Nature (social force model) Helbing & Mukerji (2012), "Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster" J. Fruin, "The causes and prevention of crowd disasters"; Weidmann (1993); Hathaway (1920) pursuit problem Jason Blundell interview, GodisaGeek (2016) Simulation: 24 bodies, 80 kg, 0.25 m radius, pursuit of the player's current position every 0.2 s, zombie speed 0.95x player. Balance limit 700-1000 N. Gameplay footage: Internet Archive uploads (NextGenTactics; "Black Ops Zombies Kino der Toten Gameplay (No Commentary)"). Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0. Tracks: Sneaky Snitch, Investigations, Plans in Motion, Spy Glass, Dark Times, Unseen Horrors. Additional sounds: Joseph SARDIN - BigSoundBank.com Photos via Wikimedia Commons: "Itaewon 2022 Halloween" by Watchers Club (CC BY 3.0); "Loveparade-Unglück-2010, Ostrampe" by Carsten Nebel (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE); "Deaths due to crowd crush... 1990-2022" by Sharma et al. (CC BY 4.0). Narration voice: ElevenLabs.