How Dead Island 2 Was Brought Back From the Dead | IGN Inside Stories
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
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