One of the big stories in Anti-Zombie Media that I had to pass on writing up for the ZRC due to the Solidarity we were out showing the union workers this week was the release of an astonishing, breathtakingly well animated trailer for an upcoming Anti-Zombie videogame that is making the rounds. The game is called ‘Dead Island’ and will apparently concern a, you guessed it, Zombie Apocalypse scenario, this time set on a Carribean island of some sort:

Dead Island is the brain child of Polish developer Techland, but you have to admit that the trailer looks very pretty (in a CGI kind of way.) Apparently the world is a mess (I know, shocking with zombies involved) and you crash land on an island thats swarming with them. Past that? Not a whole lot is known about this really hot little shooter that should be gracing the PC and every major console this year. I’m sure that’ll change over the next few months though.

The buzz around this trailer is incredible:

I’m going to take a break from my usual financial reporting here to give you a look at one of the best video game trailers I’ve ever seen. It’s for Dead Island, an upcoming zombie-horror Xbox 360 title where players try to survive on an island full of zombies. Par for the course for a video game concept, but it’s this amazing trailer that’s made the internet catch fire with buzz.

It’s played mostly in slo-motion reverse, interspersed with forward moving real-time scenes. Eventually the two halves meet, and by the time they do, you’ve realized the tragic circumstances surrounding the demise of a family on vacation on the wrong island. For anyone wondering, the incredible music in the trailer is by Ólafur Arnalds, though you can’t find the track by itself online as it was made just for the game I believe.

From the perspective of someone who’s watched an awful lot of trailers in his life, I actually find the overall *trailer* to be slow and more than a little pretentious. Slow-motion is just so easily abused it’s become a visual cliche; look no further than Zombieland for a very in-depth demonstration of this phenomenon. But at least in real life, slow-motion provides us with insight that isn’t normally there, and often requires a great deal of technical work, expensive cameras, etc.

When you do slow-motion with CG, those factors disappear to a large degree; you’re just rendering the same models to produce a different output, you’re not revealing anything new about the world. I’m sure there are unique technical challenges involved, but still, fundamentally, it’s the same idea.

But from a technical perspective, some of the *quality* of the animation is stunning. The realism involved in some of the shots makes me think extremely accurate motion-capture must have been involved, ala Avatar; regardless, I’ve never seen CG in a game mimic real life so accurately (and Avatar after all, shooting real actors in real time, isn’t animation as much as the world’s most sophisticated rotoscope).

It’s for this reason that the video is so disturbing from a ZRC perspective. The trailer implies that this game has serious muscle and creative and technical talent behind it; the popularity of the video on Youtube is also help feed an online audience rabid for more Anti-Zombie games, stoking enthusiasm for this project. No doubt it will be something the ZRC has to deal with extensively when it is released.

Let’s also address the issue of transplanting Romero style imitation Zombies back into a tropical locale, as if to deny and undercut the rich Caribbean Voodoo Zombie tradition. Interestingly enough, by focusing on what is presumably a well-to-do white tourist family, this trailer, and perhaps the larger game, may be trying to tap into the same race/class based fearmongering that helped make Voodoo Zombies a popular early Hollywood movie ‘monster’. Is ‘Dead Island’ the ‘King of the Zombies’ for the 21st Century? If a German spy ring shows up (maybe it’d be an Al Qaeda spy ring these days) then it’ll be a little more obvious.

Spreading fear and discord (and perhaps race/class tensions) with cutting edge technology and videogame violence? Sigh. It’s like someone flicked the ZRC Signal, and we don’t even *have* a ZRC Signal; nevertheless, your friendly neighborhood Zombie Rights Activists are on the case.

The video is embedded below. I should warn our audience that it is extremely graphic and disturbing.

Update: Slight correction to some hideously poor phrasing in one paragraph.

Tags: Advertising, Movies, Videogames, Youtube Mischief

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, February 18th, 2011 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.