Creator confesses that the State of Decay 3 trailer was fake

The revelation that State of Decay 3 was little more than a text file when it first emerged is a punch in the gut for those who believed in those images in 2020. The head of Undead Labs, Philip Holt, admitted in an interview with the channel Sunny Games that the famous zombie deer video was purely a conceptual piece, commissioned to the studio Blur. At that time, the project didn't even have a development team formed, with only four or five employees involved. It's the kind of empty marketing tactic that Microsoft used to try to sell the Xbox Series X and S, creating an artificial expectation about software that, in practice, was just a rough idea.

The director was very clear in dismissing the element that generated the most buzz: forget about zombie animals, they won't be in the final game. It's unfortunate that the industry continues to reward this cycle of premature announcements, where pre-rendered trailers serve only as bait for investors and eager fans. The studio itself was taken by surprise by the pressure from the Redmond giant, something that also rushed the development of titles like Everwild by Rare and the new Fable by Playground Games. Designing a game on paper is easy; the problem is when this fantasy is sold as if it were a next-generation product ready to hit the shelves.

"There was no game or development team (...) the game was in a Word document." — confessed Holt, revealing the fragility behind the scenes at that time.

Despite this murky history, Undead Labs seems to have finally found its direction, announcing an alpha test for May 2026. The complete silence of the past few years has been broken with the promise to show the "true face" of the game, which, to be honest, should have happened long ago. Meanwhile, rumors about a possible version for the PlayStation 5 are gaining traction, suggesting that exclusivity might only be temporary. If the technical base is now solid, it remains to be seen if what was built on that text document can erase the bad impression left by this deceptive advertising strategy.

This attitude of "ordering hype" before having any code running is a habit that erodes community trust. The fact that the video was entirely produced externally only reinforces that the focus was on aesthetics, not mechanics. The alpha test will be the real test to see if the extra development time was used to create something substantial or if we're facing another promise that will take years of updates to become even minimally interesting.