No Deal for Dead Island

That Dead Island trailer – supposedly created by the Glasgow-based animation studio Axis Animation 1)http://www.develop-online.net/news/37049/Dead-Island-trailer-creators-revealed – has already been viewed far over 3 million times on Youtube, with an equal amount of tweets to go. Its popularity has, in turn, turned up quite a fair bit of misinformation that now surrounds the project. As things stand, a clarification to our earlier report is in order: Unlike previously reported, no movie deal for the game has yet to be made.

In speaking to LA Times’ 24 Frames, Koch Media representative Malte Wagener stated that

There are a lot of different stories out there but the bottom line is that neither Union nor Sean Daniel has ever talked to Koch Media. Richard [Leibowitz, of Union] and [game developer] Techland agree there was never any rights. 2)http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/02/dead-island-trailer-videogame-movie-deep-silver-zombies-girl.html

I personally find it more than a little troubling that so many respectable film websites would report the deal as fact, which in turn leads me to question Koch Media and Deep Silver’s role in the propagation of the news. While I don’t think this sort of misinformation bodes well for the negotiations of a potential adaptation of the game, it’s frankly quite futile to discuss any of this as both the film and the game are still but a ghost in the hype machine. At the time of writing, Dead Island is coming out late 2011.

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No Man Is a Dead Island

…but maybe a zombie is! A singular and unique, expertly designed trailer was all it took to light a fire under the video gaming community, bringing a slow and deliberate simmer to an absolute, absolute boil. This trailer, with its decidedly nihilistic take on the zombie mode, exhibited in reverse and to a haunting piano-based soundtrack, has been called the best trailer of the year (in February!) on several sites already, for instance, by LA Times’ 24 Frames, The Escapist, Unreality, and Ain’t It Cool News:

This heavy praise heaped on the sudden smash hit of a trailer, of course, was directed towards Techland’s Dead Island, now officially housed under the wings of the German publisher Deep Silver. The game has indeed been simmering under the surface for years, with first indications of the game’s free-form, melee-based survivalist direction coming in late 2007. And then silence.

(more…)

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