Dead Island 2’s development cycle is infamous at this point. Initially revealed in 2014, its journey has been almost as treacherous as a runner trying to make it along Venice Beach in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Two studios tried to put a sequel together but were met with little more than a gory disaster. But while those projects died, hope did not. And so, the reins were handed to the team at Dambuster Studios.
Over the course of nine years and three developers, the long-awaited zombie-killing sequel has kept running (or walking) on. And now, it is finally at the finish line. This is the Inside Story of how Dead Island 2 was brought back from the dead.
The Dead Island 2 we’re playing today is unapologetically pulpy - a straightforward homage to B-movie horror that builds on the tone established in the 2011 original. It’s both a love letter to the zombie genre and a bite back against the more human-centric stories that have dominated it more recently. Since the release of its predecessor, zombie games such as The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and Days Gone have focussed more on the complexities of humanity in post-apocalyptic worlds than the simple pleasure of taking on the undead headfirst with a hatchet.
Despite respecting the stories that those games have to tell, the team at developer Dambuster Studios is much more interested in the latter. For them, there’s little more satisfying than the simple thrill of punching a zombie in the face and seeing your fist crunching through the back of its skull.
“I think we really just wanted to focus the attention back on the zombies”, explains Dave Stenton, game director at Dambuster Studios. “I think over the years, recent years with say, Walking Dead for example, which was a massively popular series, the attention, I think, had moved definitely more to humans, and humanity, and that sort of post-apocalyptic survival, and getting through the trauma of the outbreak. I mean those stories have been told, right?”
Dan Evans-Lawes, Dead Island 2’s technical art director, agrees: “I think they've done a really good job of it in the Last of Us and stuff like that, where they've kind of balanced that, so the combat and the violence does feel really brutal in a way that is quite realistic, I think. But that's a different thing to what Dead Island 1 was, and it was a different thing to what we wanted to do. We wanted to make it fun, basically, make all the violence fun rather than make you sad.”
We wanted to make it fun, basically, make all the violence fun rather than make you sad.
Before Dambuster was granted the opportunity to execute their vision, however, the story of Dead Island 2 was a sad one. Almost a decade of troubled development led to a moment few saw coming - a grand re-reveal at gamescom 2022. It was an exciting time for the studio to showcase what they’d be working so hard and so quietly on, but one that came with its fair share of nerves. How would it be received? Did people even care about Dead Island 2 anymore?
“It was torture being on at the end, all these fantastic games coming on before us, but we knew that we were kind of closing the show there”, recalls design director Adam Duckett.
“Up until that point you are always kind of asking yourself, ‘Well, I think it's fun, but I don't know how that's going to kind of pan out when we give it to other people,’” Evan-Lawes remembers.
The Dead Island 2 revealed that day was nothing more than a pipedream back in 2011, the year the original game was released. Developed by Polish studio Techland, Dead Island placed the focus firmly on butchering its plentiful hordes of zombies in creative ways with satisfying melee combat. A huge commercial hit, it sold over 5 million copies in its first two years and nurtured a passionate fanbase thanks to its over-the-top violence and echoes of classic zombie cinema.
“I think Dead Island 1 was a little bit sort of lightning in a bottle”, says Stenton. “One of my favorite zombie movies is Zombie Flesh Eaters by Lucio Fulci. That had that kind of desert island beach vibe, sort of sparsely populated and with the zombies rising up. Dead Island 1 definitely evoked that fantasy for me.”
The success of the original naturally paved the road for a sequel. But from the very beginning, the follow-up was in an odd position. Techland and publisher Deep Silver had conflicting ideas about the creative direction of a second game – a disagreement that saw Techland take their zombies elsewhere and start work on a brand new zombie game, Dying Light. And so when Deep Silver revealed Dead Island 2 at E3 2014, it came with the surprise announcement that it would not be developed by the series’ creator. Instead, German studio Yager Development of Spec Ops: The Line fame would helm the sequel, with a brand new studio - Yager Productions - created purely to work on Dead Island 2.
But the change in developer wasn’t the thing everyone was talking about. Dead Island 2 was revealed via one of video games’ most memorable trailers - a slapstick stroll with the undead along Los Angeles’ iconic Venice Beach. It made a splash, to say the least - winning IGN’s award for best E3 2014 trailer at the time and sticking long enough in the memory to have been parodied as recently as 2022 by Goat Simulator 3.
“It was a great trailer and it carried on that Dead Island tradition of great trailers”, says creative director James Worrall. “The first one was very striking, and the one set in LA was striking, but the thing that, as a creative and a narrative specialist, I was really struck by was the change in tone, and that kind of really appealed to me.”
“We were actually at E3 at the same time as Dead Island 2 was being shown. I had no notion that these years later I'd actually be at the helm working on that sequel”, laughs Stenton.
The excitement was palpable and things were looking bright for the series. Dead Island 2 was set to build on what players loved from the original - an expanded eight-player co-op campaign, a huge range of weaponry, a plethora of zombie types, a more comedic tone, and yes, lots and lots of blood.
In the months that followed, dozens of video game journalists went hands-on with Dead Island 2 at PAX and gamescom 2014. IGN was among them, and our preview enthused that “Dead Island 2 finally looks to deliver on the promise made by the blood-soaked trailer”. Sadly and frustratingly, though, that promise wouldn’t be delivered on anytime soon.
Dead Island 2 was scheduled to release in Spring of 2015. But by the summer of that year, there was still no sign of it at all, despite it having been playable at multiple game conventions. And in July, Dead Island 2’s first major disaster was made public: Yager Productions had severed ties with the project after three years of development.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, Yager managing director Timo Ullman spoke of a situation that echoed the fallout between Deep Silver and series creator Techland just a few years prior: “The team worked with enthusiasm to take Dead Island 2 to a new level of quality. However, Yager and Deep Silver's respective visions of the project fell out of alignment, which led to the decision that has been made." Yager Productions would file for insolvency just weeks later.
Despite this major setback, Deep Silver kept faith in Dead Island 2. The search began for a new developer, and in March 2016 it was announced that Sumo Digital was taking its turn to have its crack at breathing new life into the still-warm corpse. A UK-based studio known mostly at that time for sports games and LittleBigPlanet 3, it was a surprising match, to say the least. Still, Deep Silver assured that things were going smoothly at Sumo’s studio in Sheffield, although very little else was being said publicly.
Meanwhile, in May of 2016, down the road in Nottingham, the team at Dambuster was navigating through a difficult time in their own history following the disappointing reception of Homefront: The Revolution - their ambitious but ultimately flawed first-person shooter.
“I think it's fair to say it didn't launch in the state that we would've really wanted”, Stenton admits. “It was a complex game, it was an ambitious game. There were lots of emergent systems at play in it. Finding the fun of the game, the kind of simulation of it came quite late, I think, in the development of Homefront.”
“Obviously, that game didn't launch in as good a way as we'd hoped”, Evans-Lawes agrees. “It was disappointing for everybody who'd been working on it for quite some time. So we were trying to figure out what direction the studio was going to go in and we'd sort of prototyped a bunch of stuff and were trying out various ideas.”
As a studio, we were regrouping, we were rebuilding.
“As a studio, we were regrouping, we were rebuilding”, explains Duckett. “We'd moved from CryEngine to Unreal Engine, so it was new tech for us as well. We'd lost a lot of good people. You know, it happens at the end of most dev cycles, but I think at the end of Homefront, we lost more than we would've anticipated. So we were bringing in fresh talent, and with that fresh ideas and fresh knowledge of tools.“
The years following Homefront’s release was a tough learning period for Dambuster. After Homefront’s multi-layered ambitions fell short, the studio recognized that a narrow, focused vision would be key to a comeback success. Learning from the error of its ways, the first thing that Dambuster vowed to do when starting work on its new project, whatever that was to be, was to find the fun straight away. That fun was found in a prototype for the incredibly gross and gory Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, more catchily known as FLESH.
“We'd been working on the FLESH system and the gore. It was only super, super early stuff”, Evans-Lawes remembers. “All of the prototypes we were doing had some kind of concept behind them. I think this was the one that went furthest and it was a zombie-themed game.”
Worrall expands on the mood at the studio: “What was Dambuster going to make? What kind of games do we want to make? But the flesh engine and that kind of exploration really started to make people excited. Now, there was still a lot of soul-searching at that point. What does a gore engine mean for a game and how do you add something to that so it doesn't just become like a corpse-mashing simulation?”
Dambuster had crafted a fun core, but it needed a game. And that game would arrive in the form of Sumo Digital’s quiet departure from Dead Island 2 in 2018. With no further sightings of the game for years by that point, rumours had rumbled on that the zombie smasher may never see the light of day again, despite repeated statements to the contrary from Deep Silver. But in 2019 the publisher broke its silence and publicly revealed that history had repeated itself and Sumo had become Dead Island 2’s latest victim. No explanation for why the developer left the project was offered, and Sumo’s own vision for Dead Island 2 remains a mystery.
Plagued by development issues that had now seen not only one, but two different studios divorced from the project, it would indeed now be the turn of Dambuster Studios to try and get the sequel into the hands of players. It was an exciting challenge for a studio looking to put their freshly prototyped gore system into play, but a challenge nonetheless.
“Obviously, there's a certain amount of trepidation of like, ‘Well, this is a game that's been around the houses, it's been sort of semi-canceled a couple of times and now we're taking it on,” says Evan-Lawes. “Is that a bit of a poison chalice?"
It's been sort of semi-canceled a couple of times and now we're taking it on, is that a bit of a poison chalice?
Stenton shared similar concerns. “I mean, you're kind of contemplating that kind of thing very early on in development,” he says. “It just comes with the sort of pressure of the franchise, right? It's a very popular franchise. There's a fan base that is really dedicated and passionate about it. Obviously, you want to do it justice.”
But there was confidence, as Worrall explains: “You always worry if there have been a few missteps or perhaps relationships, creative relationships, have broken down with those missteps kind of thing but Deep Silver was really keen to just give us the space to come up with what we wanted to do. We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, keep it laser-focused, keep it simple. And so, we were just given the time and the space to do just that.”
The fact that Dambuster had been working for some time on the FLESH system meant that it was immediately in a good position to hit the ground running with Dead Island 2. The team had the passion and the drive to make an undead smasher, even before such a massive IP had been offered to them.
Regardless of if Dambuster had secured the rights to Dead Island 2 or not, it seems as if the studio was naturally drifting towards a zombie project. “Quite possibly [we would have made a zombie game anyway]. Nothing was concrete at that point,” Evans-Lawes reveals. “When we heard that Dead Island 2 was maybe coming our way and we had this sort of initial prototype that had lots of elements that we could take across, we were like, ‘Well, that's great because it fits with what we've got.’"
At this juncture, Worrall joined the studio: “I was brought in just after that decision and, basically, Dambuster showed me the gore tech and I just saw the gore tech and the proposals for the way they wanted to switch the tone from the original Dead Island and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is me. This is really, really good.’"
With their desire to make a zombie game already in full bloom, it appeared that the stars had aligned as Sumo’s loss became Dambuster’s gain. And so, sharing an office with zombies of efforts past, the team began work on Dead Island 2. The studio had a clear idea of what they wanted to do from the start - make the zombies, and specifically dispatching them as disgustingly as possible, the star of the show. And so despite having playable builds of both Yager and Sumo’s efforts available to them, the decision was made to rip it all up and start again.
“I guess there were two different sorts of takes on what Dead Island 2 was going to be and we were able to play both of those,” says Stenton. But it was never a realistic aim on our side to carry any of that forward. We just had our own unique take on what our Dead Island 2 was going to be like.”
It was important for us to just do a fresh start and just kind of wipe the slate clean.
“Obviously, some of those builds were quite old by the time we got them”, adds Duckett. “And in order to do the IP justice, and to put out a Dead Island 2 that I think the fans will appreciate, it was important for us to just do a fresh start and just kind of wipe the slate clean.”
Worrall was eager to avoid past mistakes. “It wasn't necessarily the content or the tone or the stuff like that,” he says. “A lot of it was perhaps they took a too complex approach, maybe. It was something that we focused on and I think this is a problem that's facing games, in general, is just blossoming complexity and it comes back to bite the studio when they're trying to get that game out the door. And so, early on when we just decided, ‘Right. No, [it’s] just going to be people versus zombies, we got a gore engine, we're going to make the combat really, really visceral and tactile and in your face."
Evans-Lawes also had the past on his mind. “On Homefront I spent a long time working on dynamic day/night cycle, dynamic weather systems, all this kind of stuff,” he recalls. “And it took ages and we got it to a pretty good place, but it made no difference to the game really. It didn't make any difference to what you were playing minute to minute. And so I was really keen to put my efforts into something that I felt was absolutely a core part of the game.”
There were aspects of the previous versions of Dead Island 2 that Dambuster appreciated, but seeing as they were effectively starting all over again from scratch anyway, they stuck to their guns and decided on a singular, narrow vision - aiming to avoid the bloat that Homefront had succumbed to, but also wary of not falling foul of the same errors their predecessor studios had. For example, Dambuster settled on three-player co-op, whereas Yager’s original vision back in 2014 was to have eight-player.
“We definitely had to evaluate what was there and go, ’Which features do we want to have in the game?’" says Evans-Laws. “And certainly, there were some interesting ideas that we looked at from previous iterations of the game that didn't make it in, but primarily for scope reasons and trying to get the project done in a reasonable timeframe.
“There was some vehicle stuff, like driving cars, things like that, where it was certainly interesting what we saw in a previous build and there were some quite nice ideas,” he continues. “But in terms of the level design and keeping levels at the scale where the hand-to-hand melee combat works, you design a level differently if you're driving around it.”
We had discussions of Catalina Island, which is just off the Californian Coast.
Alternative locations were also discussed, as Worral reveals: “We had discussions of Catalina Island, which is just off the Californian Coast. We thought about that as a location but, again, back to that Hollywood lens and the picture postcard, it's about delivering that familiarity that people the world over are familiar with. That Los Angeles through the Hollywood lens.”
“Originally it was the whole of California I think”, Evans-Lawes adds. “Or at least there were going to be bits in different areas of California that had been already sort of scaled down to LA. Yeah, I think that was pretty much non-negotiable. In terms of the tone, that kind of went a few ways. We had to, I guess, figure out exactly where we wanted it to land. I think it's landed fairly close to that Dead Island 2 trailer. But we experimented first of all with, ‘Does it want to go a bit more serious?’ And I think it's definitely landed in a good place.”
Duckett explains that location wasn’t necessarily all-important, however. “Dead Island is known for those paradise-gone-to-hell locations and we wanted to make sure that we doubled down on that,” he says. “We wanted to make sure we doubled down, tripled down maybe even, on zombies at the core, to just really go to town on as many zombies as we could put together. Doubling down on the gore, the FLESH system again, just because as a zombie fan, that's what I want to see.”
But what did fans of the series want to see from the sequel? The studio wrestled with those expectations. “I think we expected that obviously, people are going to have preconceived ideas about what Dead Island 2 is going to be,” Evans-Lawes explains “They're going to have preconceived ideas about, ‘Well, it's been in development for 10 years and so therefore, it's going to either be a total disaster or it's going to be this absolutely enormous behemoth of a game that just has everything in it.’
“And in actual fact, we weren't developing it for 10 years, so we didn't have all that time to make a huge, huge, huge game,” he clarifies. “And I think one of the things that we learned from Homefront was that you need to be focused on what you're doing and you need to choose a few things and do them really, really well.”
“It was that laser focus on being best in class, first-person combat”, states Stenton. “I think in fairness to the team, it is really something that genuinely we've had right away from day one. Right the way from those very early prototypes and those very early prototypes of the FLESH system, and the weapons, and the enemies.
“It wasn't based on a trailer, it wasn't based on a storyboard. It was based on gameplay and the fantasy of hacking apart zombies, and melting zombies in the most spectacular, gory, groundbreaking ways possible.”
From late 2018 to the summer of 2022, the creation of that grotesque, pulpy, and violent fantasy quietly took place behind the firmly closed doors of Dambuster. Not a single screenshot, video clip, or even quote was released to the public; a conscious decision made by the studio to allow themselves to get their heads down and work with as little outside interference as possible.
“It's partly because we knew with the history of the franchise, it's been such a long wait for players, and we knew that there'd been a couple of false starts before”, Stenton reveals. “So this time we really better make sure that we've got something awesome to play, something awesome to show. Absolutely just prove once and for all when it's announced this time it's real, it's super close to launch, it's coming soon, you can play it already.”
We didn't want to announce vaporware, we didn't want to just come out with a CGI and then have people go, ‘Well, is there really a game?
“The game had had two false starts, right?” says Worrall. “We didn't want to announce vaporware, we didn't want to just come out with a CGI and then have people go, ‘Well, is there really a game?’"
Stenton agrees, stating “It can be challenging to read those kinds of comments and sit on your hands and not give any hints or any indication, because as a studio you invest your heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears into the project and you have been doing for a while.”
And so we find ourselves back in 2022, when that silence was broken in the final moments of gamescom’s Opening Night Live. Dead Island 2 made its very loud and very unexpected return from the dead and, to the team’s relief, the trailer was met with a newfound hunger. The long-thought corpse of a game was finally reanimated. For Dambuster, it was a moment of pure relief matched only by the excitement from the fanbase.
Stenton recalls the moment fondly. “It was funny at Opening Night Live because we'd got, actually, Dead Island T-shirts that we weren't allowed to wear until the moment of the reveal,” he laughs. “Obviously, you know, you're super pensive at the point that it's all about to happen. But it's such a relief once it's out there, once everybody knows. Then finally we're able to show the branding and what we've been working on for all of these years. It's just releasing the pressure valve, to be honest, and being able to talk more freely about it and wear the game with pride and show the game with pride.”
“It is really nice to see people's reactions when they play the game and people's kind of shock at the gore system and everyone kind of going like, ‘Oh man, bloody hell!’ but then also laughing”, says Evans-Lawes. “It's really gruesome, but it's to the point that you just kind of have to laugh. So seeing people actually do that, play the game, whack a zombie in the head, and then just start laughing because the gore is so ridiculous, you're kind of like, ‘Right, okay, yeah, we got that.’"
The re-reveal at gamescom signalled the light at the end of the tunnel for the long-tortured sequel. Dead Island 2 would finally arrive in the spring of 2023 and thousands of zombies would once again die in all manner of experimentally violent ways.
For the best part of a decade, the first question that came to many when thinking about Dead Island 2 was “Is it a real game?” But for the team at Dambuster, the question is what do they hope its lasting legacy will be?
“I hope they remember that it was fun,” says Duckett. “As a designer, that's what I want to hear. It was fun to engage with the setups. It was fun to kill the zombies. It was vibrant, it was pulpy, it was different. It didn't take itself too seriously, and it knew what it wanted to be.”
“I'm pretty confident that players will look back at the launch of Dead Island 2 and see how it's reinjected a sense of vibrancy, and purpose, and real differentiation to the zombie genre, that we bring something different, and really iconic, and really worthwhile”, says Stenton.
Evans-Lawes hopes “That players think, ‘This is the game that has reinvigorated the zombie genre and taken it back to a place that is trashy, kind of pulpy and lots of fun.’ That's what I wanted to do with it. And I feel like that's what we've done. We have succeeded where others have not. So yeah, that's nice too.”
We have succeeded where others have not. So yeah, that's nice.
Worrall holds hope “that they will think that Dead Island 2 wasn't such a simple undertaking and I think that was proven with the development cycle but getting it right was worth the wait.”
So yes, Dead Island 2 is definitely a real game, just not necessarily the same one that started life all those years ago. It’s been a long decade for fans of the series. Studios may have fallen by the wayside like dismembered limbs, but neither the head was removed nor the brain destroyed. Dead Island 2 successfully imitated its own shambling hordes as the game that refused to die.
I guess the only logical question to ask next then is… Is Dead Island 3 a real game?
“No comment”, says Stenton.
Simon Cardy would last two minutes in a zombie apocalypse. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
