Dead Island is a game returning from publicity limbo. Polish development studio Techland doubtlessly wanted to make a big splash when they introduced the title back into the preview cycle. With the exclusive IGN premiere of its trailer, they mostly achieved this goal. The short movie is brilliant, and everyone is talking about it. But unless Dead Island is going to be Heavy Rain with zombies, I’d like to know what the promotion tells us about the game.
IGN’s accompanying eyes-on report describes Dead Island as a "first-person zombie-slasher/action-RPG." That’s not the image of the game the trailer evokes for me. In fact, it's not even close. When I consider the trailer, it actually tells me very little. For all I know Dead Island could turn out to be a first-person version of Dead Rising, only lacking all the humor that made that franchise fun.
I used to go to the movies every weekend when I was a teenager, and I was insistent upon never missing a preview. If I was late to the theater, I’d often kill two hours waiting for the next showing, so I didn't miss any of the coming attractions. Accordingly, I’m not against video-game trailers. Some of them are quite good and actually tell us something about what they're advertising.
Take, for instance, the Gears of War "Mad World" trailer, with its melancholy acoustic cover of the classic Tears for Fears song. It was the first game trailer I remember running in theaters. The creators produced the trailer using the in-game engine, and it was downright haunting. The actual emotional thrust of the game wasn’t nearly as compelling, but at least we got to see what the game and its protagonist would look like. It had a direct correlation with the final product.
Last year’s BioShock Infinite trailer didn't use in-engine visuals, but the environment in the BioShock series is as important as the game mechanics and the story. I don’t have any issue with using a compelling, cinematic depiction of the city of Columbia to deliver our first look at the title. The designers also introduced us to one of the main characters, Elizabeth. The trailer gave us something valuable to think about.
After I learned how to think about movies critically in film school, I began to notice how trailers often cherry-pick the best moments from a film. Oftentimes, movies are 87 minutes of tedium wrapped around those few key moments. Soon after, I stopped falling for the trailers.
Remember the Dante’s Inferno commercial than ran during the Super Bowl in 2010? The use of Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone was brilliant. Taken as a piece of filmmaking, this commercial was as fantastic as any of the three mentioned above. Then Visceral Games delivered a title that fell apart in its latter third and didn't evoke any sense of lost love or romantic hope that the commericial implied.
We also aren't likely to forget Halo 3’s stunning "Believe" campaign for a very long time. The choice of Chopin's Raindrops Prelude, Op 25 no 15 could not have been more perfect. The live-action "Museum" commercial resonated very powerfully with me, too; I quite enjoy soldiers' memoirs. Taken as a whole, the ad campaign promised a tale of desperate hope and drama that was utterly absent from the game. Instead, we received a weak narrative designed to wrap up Master Chief’s storyline.
I can talk about the Dead Island trailer as a brilliant work of filmmaking, but that’s a conversation about what’s possible with computer-generated images and digital characters. We could also examine how video-game marketing is evolving. We could talk about taking cues from the film industry and whether or not it’s appropriate to adopt the advertising tools used to promote more passive forms of media. But none of these topics have anything to do with what kind of game Dead Island is.
Perhaps, if IGN had focused on the dramatic intent of the story, the write up might have piqued my interest as a gamer instead of a media critic, but the available info gives us nothing to suggest that the trailer represents, in any way, the final product. My guard is up. Is it another bait-and-switch? Or is it a legitimate sign that a great game is forthcoming?
None of this makes me a killjoy. It makes me a gamer who’s wary of these cinematic ad campaigns. They've burned me in the past. Until Techland coughs up some serious details about the title, my guard will stay up, and I will remain unconvinced that the trailer is actually a game trailer. For now, it's a very pretty piece of filmmaking.
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist, Gamasutra, G4TV.com, and @GAMER magazine and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DennisScimeca. First Person is his weekly column on Bitmob concerned with questions around the video-game industry and the journalism that covers it.