Somewhere inside the Davis Arts Center, 1919 F St, right next door to Community Park, there is a gaming PC set up every festival Sunday running a video game that did not exist until a handful of Davis high schoolers decided the parade needed one. It is called "Da Vinci's Zombies: Bike Parade Edition", and yes, the fire-blasting scepter is real.
What you actually do in it
The game is a festival adaptation of an earlier club project called "Lev's Zombies." Players wield a fire-blasting scepter, battle Zombies and a festival-specific enemy called ZomBees, and collect lawn signs from the entertainment stations scattered around the park's virtual version of itself. Get far enough, and you reach a boss battle with a giant snail. It is published on itch.io by DVGameClub, available for Windows (a 773 MB .7z file) and macOS (719 MB .zip), free to download, or pay what you want. The listing discloses that some of the graphics were AI-assisted, a small note of honesty worth appreciating.
Why a festival needs a video game at all
Most of what happens at the Zombie Bike Parade Festival is analog by design: bikes, costumes, a balloon basket, a burner flame you pull with your own hand. The arcade is the one corner of the day that runs on electricity instead of adrenaline, and it exists for a simple reason: not every kid wants to ride a bike loop, and a gaming PC set up next to the Halloween crafts table gives a restless ten-year-old somewhere to go that is still, unmistakably, part of the festival. The lawn-sign collection mechanic even mirrors the real Zombie Kingdom Quest happening outside the Arts Center's doors, so a kid who plays the game and a kid who walks the stations end up doing roughly the same thing in two different worlds.
The club behind it
The Da Vinci Video Game Design Club meets at Da Vinci Charter Academy, 1400 E. 8th St, Davis, open to grades 9 through 12, Mondays and Thursdays from 3:30 to 5:00 pm during the school year. Students work in Unreal Engine, GameMaker, Blender and the Adobe Creative Suite, learning digital art, 3D modeling, animation, sound design, coding and interactive storytelling along the way. Other titles the club has shipped include Archer the Archer, Robot Survival, Tiger Dash, Duck Ship, Star Bugs and, in a nice bit of cross-pollination, a video adaptation of festival director Aaron Wedra's own board game, Coffee Time.
Insert brains to play. If you get far enough, a giant snail is waiting.
That last detail matters more than it looks: Aaron Wedra chairs the Video Game Design Club at Da Vinci, meaning the same person directing the entire festival also runs the student club that built its official game. It is one more example of how small the circle of people making this event happen actually is, and how much they manage to get done inside it.
Play it yourself
The game was originally built for the 7th Annual Zombie Bike Parade Festival in 2025 and remains linked from the 2026 home page under "DOWNLOAD THIS GAME FOR YOUR PC OR MAC." During the festival itself, you do not need to download anything at all, just find the gaming computer inside the Davis Arts Center, which also hosts Monster Crafts and a Friday Family Open Studio the same weekend.
The student names and roles behind the game are not published anywhere on itch.io or the club's own site, credited only collectively, since several of the developers are minors. If a future version of this page names them individually, it will be because the club and their families chose to share that, not because we went looking.
Take it home
Because the game lives on itch.io rather than behind a festival paywall, anyone who plays it at the Arts Center can go home and keep playing, or send it to a cousin three states away who has never heard of the Zombie Bike Parade Festival at all. That small bit of portability turns one afternoon at a gaming PC into something that outlasts the weekend, a free, permanent, slightly ridiculous souvenir with a giant snail boss fight built in.
The Arts Center itself does double duty during the festival, hosting Monster Crafts and a Friday Family Open Studio alongside the arcade setup, so if a kid burns out on the giant snail, there is usually a paintbrush or a glue stick within arm's reach as a backup plan.
See the rest of the Arts Center weekend on the Arcade page, or check the full schedule of events for when the gaming computer is set up. If your family or business wants to help fund the next student project, sponsorship is how a lot of this festival's smaller, stranger corners get built in the first place.
