What this is

Zombie Blood was a Spanish spirit that looked like blood: 30% vol, with a nine-chapter story behind it. It launched in 2014 from a small team who wanted to get it off the ground on their own, tried to raise money on Indiegogo and was on sale for a while. The project did not come together: in November 2015 someone touched its website for the last time, the domain lapsed afterwards and nothing was left standing.

This is that website, put back up in 2026 with the material from back then.

What was left

The project was asleep on a disk: three copies of the site, twenty-four database dumps and a design folder. The live copy ran on Joomla 2.5.28, with seventy tables and twenty-nine articles inside it.

To look at it at all, the machine of the time had to be rebuilt, because none of it starts on a 2026 computer: PHP 5.6 and MariaDB in containers, the dump of 3 November 2015 loaded on top, and the links in the database rewritten, since every one of them pointed at a domain that no longer exists.

Underneath there was material worth the trouble, and it all carries the same signature: Dumaker, an illustrator from Albacete who did the art direction for the project. The nine digital paintings are his, one per chapter, with a redwood forest, a shop window of televisions in the rain and a burning city. So are the logo, the label and the bottle. There was also a background video of a stone wall under rain, the bottle cut out with its green outline, claw textures, the logo in vector and the press dossier in both languages. Eleven years later that work stands on its own, and it is the real reason all of this was put back together.

What the design asked for and never got built

The find that changed the job was in the design folder: the full comp of the site, finished and annotated in red by the designer, which was never built.

It carries the instructions nobody carried out. Parallax between the wood texture and the zombie faces behind it. The header fixed on scroll. Chapter navigation with side arrows and markers. And a note about the bottle: once there was a final one, swap it for the same image with the logo in fluorescent ink, “as if the lights went out”.

What shipped in 2014 was a poorer version of that design: with the tooling of the time, it was expensive and brittle. What you are looking at is the whole design, eleven years late, for a drink that is no longer made.

How it was put back up

It was rebuilt with Astro, with the original content pulled out of the database and the images from back then. The texts are kept word for word, typos included, because correcting them would mean writing a version that never existed.

The motion is new, and it chases what those red notes asked for: scrolling down from the front page puts out the lamp and leaves the bottle lit by its own edge; the nine chapters pass horizontally like the shots of a film; and the form rots when you use it.

The images were reprocessed: the video drops from 3.7 MB to 906 KB and the paintings from half a megabyte to thirty kilobytes, without it showing. Nothing loads from anyone else’s server: no fonts, no analytics, no social widgets.

What does not work, on purpose

The shop does not open. The campaign cannot be backed. The form sends nothing and says so. Every one of those buttons is still there and, when pressed, explains why it is dead.

It is the only honest thing left to do with a website that has nobody on the other side any more. Anything else would be pretending the brand is still alive.