SAN FRANCISCO – Should the United States fall to a zombie apocalypse, feel free to spend your remaining moments as a human using Amazon's new open-source software for building 3D video games to run heart-lung machines or autonomous vehicles.
But if zombies aren't munching on your neighbor's brains, Amazon clearly states you shouldn't use its free gaming engine to run critical medical equipment or self-driving cars. Most anything else goes.
That's the wry bit of fun buried deep in the Terms and Conditions for Amazon's Web-hosting service as it pertains to Lumberyard, the company's newly-released video-game development software.
Amazon (AMZN) is known as a hard-driving company where employees tend to be pretty nose to the grindstone. But clearly someone there has a nice sense of humor, and superiors willing to let the Seattle company's freak flag fly.
Deep in the dense legal language of the terms for Amazon Web Services is a section about Lumberyard. There, astute readers will find Number 57.10, which begins with a disclaimer that the software is not meant to be used in life- or safety-critical systems such as medical equipment or self-driving cars.
Unless, that is, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (or a successor body, should Atlanta have fallen) has declared a zombie apocalypse.
Or as Amazon's terms put it, "a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization."
All of this free publicity hasn't hurt Amazon. The single sentence in a 26,000 word document has helped it get the word out about the newly-released Lumberyard, a gaming engine that is free to developers but which must be hosted on either Amazon's Web servers or the developers' own.
Not the first apocalypse
Zombies tend to pop up in the oddest places. Back in 2011, some brilliant public health docs at the CDC were trying to come up with ways to get people to prepare for natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, or pandemic outbreaks of influenza.
The usual emergency preparedness announcements weren't getting a lot of traction, so CDC released Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse, a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek guide to what ordinary people could do in an outbreak of what it termed Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, or ANSDS.
Not surprisingly, the tips were equally useful if the power were to fail due to something as mundane as the weather.
In Amazon's case, perhaps Lumberyard could serve as the crucial vaccine-creation software used by a freshman biology major holed up in her parent's basement as the hordes descend. The world could be saved because, under the Terms and Conditions, she would be free to use what normally would be off-limits.
Hey, it's just as likely as an outbreak of ANSDS.