Ever wanted to protect your friends, your family or life-as-we-know-it from a horde of zombies? Well here's your chance Melburnians. Come Halloween this year, the undead will be unleashed upon a building on the city's outskirts. All that stands between them and the annihilation of the human race is a few thousand brave souls with a couple of hours to kill and a spare $100-$150 to burn.

Well, that's what a trio of horror and video-game aficionados with professional backgrounds in IT and filmmaking is hoping. Friends David Leadbetter, Benjamin Powell and Drew Hobbs are the brains behind IRL Shooter, a new events company planning to stage its first 'In Real Life' video-game style adventure later this year.

Halloween last year was the last time we saw zombies in Melbourne. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

While the exact scenario and location remain secret, about 200 tickets have already been snapped up for Patient 0, which will pit teams of six people equipped with laser guns against hungry zombies in a do-or-die battle. The setting will be a multi-storey building refashioned as a secret medical research lab where, apparently, an experiment goes a little haywire.

Interest in the concept is so strong the group raised nearly $17,000 of seed-funding over the past week through crowd-sourcing website Pozible.com. This money will mostly be spent creating the online booking system. The Melbourne-based business plans to raise the remainder of the projected $235,000 needed to stage the event, which will run from October 31 until the end of November, from ticket sales.