Axis Studios, the Scottish animation and VFX company who made the 2011 Dead Island rewinding teaser, is shutting down. Per GamesIndustry, the studio has ceased production on all its current projects, with 162 employees laid off as the company enters administration.
Back in 2011, Axis produced a cinematic E3 premiere teaser that singlehandedly catapulted Dead Island to the forefront of public consciousness. In a slow-motion, rewound sequence, the trailer revealed how a family’s White Lotus-ass vacation met an early, grisly end at the hands of an amassing zombie horde. Even without any gameplay footage, the response at the time was huge. (Zombies weren’t quite as played out in 2011.)
I didn’t end up enjoying Dead Island very much, but I sure as hell bought it and that teaser is to blame. Imitated and parodied countless times since, Axis’s Dead Island trailer left a profound fingerprint on the long-running trope of big budget game reveals pairing gruesome violence with moody, contemplative backing music. Coincidentally, Axis eventually worked on Gears of War, too.
Since then, Axis provided animation and VFX for some of the biggest names in games, having worked on trailers and cinematics for Destiny 2, The Elder Scrolls Online, Warframe, Magic the Gathering, Halo, and more—including the music video for K/DA’s “More” single. As the studio’s archived site shows, Axis also had a healthy share of VFX credits for TV productions, like HBO’s Chernobyl and Netflix’s Love, Death, and Robots.
“Axis has more recently been impacted by a decline in customer projects, as well as increases in labor costs,” said Alistair McAlinden, one of the joint administrators managing Axis’s closure for Scottish restructuring firm Interpath Advisory, in a statement to Televisual. “The directors worked tirelessly to explore alternative solutions, but ultimately had to take the difficult decision to seek the appointment of administrators.”
Adding to the grim tally of ongoing layoffs and closures plaguing the games industry, Axis’s shuttering underlines how that damage extends beyond game development studios and publishers themselves.