The wild, winding insanity that is the history of ‘Dead Island 2’

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There was a temporary moment — although at the time, it felt endless — at the beginning of the 2010s when zombie narratives were the genre du jour in pop culture. The allegory of the undead has been around for decades: George Romero accidentally used the trope in Night of the Living Dead to discuss racism in 1968, and then intentionally in Dawn of the Dead to criticize consumerism; Telltale’s The Walking Dead brought pathological gravitas to narrative-based video games; and The Last of Us has become an unkillable IP since it released in 2013. But zombies can also be plain entertaining or gripping — just look at the success of Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, and Call of Duty’s Zombies series. 

Polish developer Techland jumped into the undead waters in 2011 with the release of Dead Island, four years after it was first announced. The game was a melee-focused action game, where players survived a zombie apocalypse on a deserted island. (While it was generally positively received, nothing topped the quality of the game’s trailer — which holds up as a dramatic short film well over a decade later.) Techland continued with the series briefly, developing the standalone expansion Dead Island: Riptide — which didn’t really fix any issues with the original but did ship with a mutilated torso — before jumping ship to create the Dying Light franchise. 

Publisher Deep Silver, however, was far from finished with Dead Island, and quickly named Germany-based Yager Development as the lead on a direct sequel. Best known for the politically heavy Spec Ops: The Line, Yager surprised everyone by leaning into dark humor with Dead Island 2’s oddly iconic E3 2014 announcement trailer (the recently released Goat Simulator 3