The Dead Rise (to the top of the charts)
In what is absolutely one of the wildest “development hell to success” tales of all time, Deep Silver has announced that its turbulent release Dead Island 2 has already sold one million copies on PC and console platforms, less than a week on from its initial release.
The sun-soaked zombie slayer, which finally hit the market after a chaotic, 10-year development cycle, also debuted at number one in the UK Charts, surpassing new releases Minecraft Legends and Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp and usurping last week’s number one, EA’s perennial top-slotter FIFA 23. Deep Silver notes that players/slayers have already killed over a billion zombies since launch, while biting the sand themselves somewhere in the region of 28 million times. Nobody said it was gonna be easy.
HELL-A welcomed over a million Slayers during its launch weekend.
That's mind-blowing. Thank you! #DeadIsland #SeeYouInHELLA pic.twitter.com/zcowIPTM3C— Dead Island (@deadislandgame) April 24, 2023
Dead Island 2, first announced way back at E3 2014, has passed through several developers, went through a number of rewrites and redesigns, and was a frequent running gag throughout the gaming community — A title that never seemed to ever reach fruition, yet simply refused to go away.
As I wrote in our review, the final result isn’t exactly a Game of the Year contender, but sports a healthy sense of humor, deeply satisfying combat, and smart and attractive visuals, resulting in a title that will definitely go down as having one of the most surprising “happy endings” in game development history.
Dead Island 2 is available now on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox platforms.
