Nacht der Untoten

The First Room

On ZFRR, the First Room of Nacht der Untoten is the starting room: the large ground-floor room of the bunker where the players spawn. In World at War, every game starts there with 500 points, an M1911, the knife and two Stielhandgranate stick grenades.

Two ways lead out of the room, and both stay closed in a First Room game: the door marked “Help”, to the right of the spawn, for 1000 points, which opens onto the Help room and the Mystery Box, and the sofa barricade on the staircase, also 1000, which leads to the upper floor. The zombies come in through five boarded windows. Each board put back pays 10 points, up to a limit per round.

Kar98k

200 points, a bolt-action rifle drawn in chalk on a wall of the room, the cheapest wall weapon of the map.

M1A1 Carbine

600 points, a semi-automatic rifle with a 15-round magazine. Its buy prompt calls it the “M1 Carbine”.

Those are the only two wall weapons of the room. Everything else, the Mystery Box included, is behind the Help door or up the stairs. In World at War the room is even barer than in the later versions:

Windows that hold

A zombie tears the boards off a window but cannot hit a player through it: it has to climb in first. From Verrückt on, and in the Black Ops remaster of this map, the zombies hit through the barriers.

No perk at all

Nacht der Untoten has no Perk-a-Cola in World at War, so every run is played on 100 health, two hits and down. Mule Kick, which stands in the starting room of the later versions, only came with a Black Ops update.

Nothing else

No power switch, no trap, no Pack-a-Punch, no special round and no Carpenter power-up.

What does drop is four power-ups, Insta-Kill, Double Points, Max Ammo and Nuke, and in World at War the two timed ones count down in plain text:

Insta-Kill

A glowing skull dropped by a zombie. For 30 seconds, every zombie dies in one hit.

Text timers

The remaining seconds of Insta-Kill and Double Points are written at the bottom of the screen. From Black Ops on, an icon replaces them.

In solo, every round from round 5 holds exactly 24 zombies, the spawn delay hits its floor at round 73 and the health of the zombies overflows at round 163, which brings the insta-kill rounds. That is why the solo board of this map goes past round 600, far beyond every other World at War First Room. The whole mechanism is explained in World at War: Rounds.

The Nacht der Untoten leaderboard keeps a board for each team size, from solo to four players. World at War has no First Room rules of its own at B2: its World at War rules apply, on top of the First Room itself. The ones that matter here:

Doors closed

No door may be opened, the Help door and the sofa barricade on the stairs included.

Full rounds

Every round is played in full, and glitches and exploits are not allowed.

Regular difficulty

The campaign difficulty must be set to Regular.

Platforms

On PC, only Plutonium with the verified community patch, its anticheat output always visible; the Steam or disc version is not accepted. Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series and PlayStation 3 are accepted.

Indicators

An automatic insta-kill round indicator is allowed on Nacht der Untoten and Verrückt only. An end-of-spawns indicator, a trap timer or a zombie counter is not.

Old School ranking

Solo and two-player runs count in the Old School ranking, converted to the equivalent round on the Black Ops board of the map: past round 73 the endless solo rounds are compressed, and round 601 counts as round 44.

A run that breaks these rules is not accepted, whatever the round reached.

Overview

Nacht der Untoten, German for “Night of the Undead”, is the first Zombies map. Treyarch hid it in Call of Duty: World at War as a bonus mode, then called Nazi Zombies: it launches on its own at the end of the last campaign mission. The map is three rooms of a bunker on an airfield, with a single Mystery Box and the debut of the Ray Gun. The mission briefing in the menu reads: “You drove them deep into the heart of the Reich. You thought they were dead. You were wrong.”

GameCall of DutyWorld at War

EditionBase game, unlocked by finishing the campaign

ReleaseNovember 11, 2008 in North AmericaNovember 14, 2008 in Europe

PlatformsPC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360Not in the Wii version

LocationA bunker on an abandoned airfield in German-occupied Europe

CharactersFour unnamed US Marines

Players1 to 4

Game filesnazi_zombie_prototype

An Allied plane crashes on the airfield. Four Marines survive the crash and hold the bunker against the undead for as long as they can. The later Zombies timeline dates the crash to June 4, 1945, and makes the map the first one of the Aether story.

Nacht der Untoten came back twice: remastered in Black Ops, first with the Hardened and Prestige editions and then in the Rezurrection pack, and remade in the Zombies Chronicles pack of Black Ops III. The Hub has a separate book for the remaster: Nacht der Untoten on Black Ops.

Characters

The players are four unnamed US Marines, survivors of the plane crash, whose appearance is drawn at random. They have no story of their own. Named characters only come later: “Tank” Dempsey is among the Marines of Verrückt, and the crew of Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo and Richtofen first appears on Shi No Numa. In the Black Ops remaster, the Marines are replaced by that crew.

Enemies

Nacht der Untoten has one enemy: the zombie, an undead German soldier. No Hellhound, no boss and no special round: every round is a zombie round. In World at War its zombies cannot reach through the windows, and they climb in through the five windows of the starting room, the two windows and the cave wall of the Help room and the four windows upstairs.

Weapons

Every game starts with the M1911, the knife and two Stielhandgranate. The walls sell eight weapons and the stick grenades, and a Sniper Cabinet upstairs holds a scoped Kar98k:

Starting room

The Kar98k for 200 and the M1A1 Carbine for 600. In the First Room.

Help room

The Double-Barreled Shotgun and the Thompson, 1200 each. The Thompson is chalked at 1500 on the wall but costs 1200.

Upstairs

Stielhandgranate for 250, the sawed-off Double-Barreled Shotgun with grip for 1200, the M1897 Trench Gun for 1500 and the BAR for 1800.

Sniper Cabinet

The scoped Kar98k for 1500, upstairs, with ammunition at 750.

The Mystery Box costs 950 points a use. It stands in the Help room and never moves: the map has a single spot for it, so there is no teddy bear and no beam of light. It holds World War II weapons, the wall weapons included, and the Ray Gun:

Ray Gun

The first Wonder Weapon of the series, made for World at War by the Treyarch weapon artist Max Porter. It fires green bolts that kill in one hit until around round 20, with splash damage that can hurt the player who fires it. On Nacht der Untoten it only comes from the Mystery Box.

Every weapon of the World at War version, its price and its place

The bunker

The map is a single building in three parts. The starting room on the ground floor, five windows. The Help room behind the door of the same name, with the Mystery Box, two windows and a wall onto a dead-end cave where zombies also come in. The upper floor, the largest area, split in two rooms with four windows, reached by the stairs of the starting room or by the stairs of the Help room, each blocked by debris for 1000 points. Outside, the crashed plane and the trucks burn in the fog.

The three rooms, their doors and their windows

Perks

There is no Perk-a-Cola on Nacht der Untoten in World at War. The four perks, Juggernog, Quick Revive, Speed Cola and Double Tap Root Beer, arrive with the next map, Verrückt, and need its power switch. Mule Kick was added to the Black Ops version by an update on September 27, 2011, in the starting room.

What changed in Black Ops

The Black Ops remaster keeps the layout and the wall weapons. The rest changed:

The Mystery Box holds Cold War-era weapons instead of the World War II ones, and adds the Thundergun and the Monkey Bomb.
Mule Kick stands in the starting room since an update.
The unnamed Marines are replaced by Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo and Richtofen, with voice lines taken from other maps.
The zombies reach through the windows.
The Carpenter power-up drops, and the Insta-Kill and Double Points timers are replaced by icons.
The radio of the Help room plays other songs, and a song Easter egg, Undone, is hidden behind three explosive barrels.
The Thompson wall chalk shows its real price.

The details of the remaster are in Nacht der Untoten on Black Ops.

Secrets

Nacht der Untoten has no main quest. Its secrets are small, and they started the habit of hiding things in Zombies maps:

The radio

Knifed or shot, the radio of the Help room, to the right of the Mystery Box, plays music: the Black Cats theme, the Red Army theme, the Königgrätzer Marsch or the song “WTF”.

The writing on the walls

“You must ascend from darkness” in the starting room and “Salvation lies above” in the Help room.

The Help door

Its last letter is unfinished, so the chalk reads “HELL”.

The radio, the writing on the walls and the hidden details

Achievements

No achievement or trophy belongs to Nacht der Untoten. The 66 achievements of World at War are on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and the Zombies ones came with Map Pack 2 and Map Pack 3: they can only be earned on Shi No Numa and Der Riese.

Trivia

The English name, “Night of the Undead”, is a nod to George A. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead.
The bunker is the one of the multiplayer map Airfield and of the campaign mission Hard Landing.
The song of the Game Over screen is “Lullaby for a Dead Man”. It plays in full as an Easter egg on the next map, Verrückt.
Buying the Stielhandgranate with between 130 and 250 points leaves the player with a negative balance.
If a player enters the Help room in the first four rounds, no zombie comes out of its cave wall before round 5.
The trucks outside the bunker can be destroyed.
Jesse Snyder, who worked on Nazi Zombies, also hid the Ray Gun in the campaign mission Little Resistance without telling the rest of the team, and was nearly fired for it.
In the German version of the game, the Ray Gun is called the “Beam Cannon”.
“Ascend from darkness”, written in the starting room, became step two of the Origins main quest, after the steps of Viktor Reznov’s escape from Vorkuta.