Overkill’s The Walking Dead Can’t Be Rereleased Because of Skybound

A Starbreeze developer has revealed details about Overkill’s The Walking Dead, including why it can’t be rereleased.

Originally released in 2018 for Windows, Overkill’s The Walking Dead is the worst received game in Starbreeze’s history. Because the company staked their future on the success of this game, its failure led to Starbreeze filing for reconstruction due to shortage of liquidity, its CEO and two board directors resigning, and those outgoing executives being investigated by the Swedish Economic Crime Authority.

Earlier today, Starbreeze Senior Game Designer Miodrag ‘Mio’ Kovačević, tweeted about the five year anniversary of Overkill’s The Walking Dead. Using the online handle Real Slavic Bear, he shared insight about the game’s development in an impromptu AMA on Twitter.

First things first, Mio confirmed that making this game was a terrible experience for developers like him. He revealed he worked on it for two and a half years, followed by a year and a half of burnout.

Mio referred to Starbreeze’s proprietary game engine Valhalla as “barely usable”, but also admits he doesn’t have much insight to it other than using it to make the game. As such, he doesn’t know the state of the technology now.

Mio also revealed that time constraints led to many of the decisions made in the game. In his words:

“It’s hard to say. Many of the game’s decisions were made because of the time constraints. On design side, we didn’t have time to flesh out systems, so other games were heavily used as reference. But that might have happened even with extra development time.”

For those curious, Mio also had something to say about the criminal investigation vs Starbreeze executives, and how the media covered it:

“The police raid was a couple of guys in civilian uniform coming in and grabbing a PC. It was so low-key, I only heard about the “police raid” from game news sites.

EG (editor’s note: Eurogamer) article was frustrating. About 70-80% was accurate. Remainder was either embellished or not true IMO.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game now is the fact that it was pulled from Steam and essentially no longer exists as a result. Mio explains that they had plans for the game, and why those plans were cancelled, and the game was removed:

“We had a patch ready to go, but Skybound pulled the game the night before we could push it. We had new weapons, a new character, a new map and major balance changes ready for around 3 more months of updates total.

That was the remaining content that was planned before moving on.”

Mio adds:

“As far as directly because Skybound pulled the plug, we didn’t ship (I think) 3 weapons, 1 new map and 1 new character that had new mechanics like a “gut bucket” to hide yourself from Walkers and the ability to ‘detective vision’ see human enemies.”

Finally, as indicated in the title of this article, here is why you can no longer play the game today:

“After the game was pulled, whenever people asked Skybound to let us release the content as an update, Skybound told players to ask us. Whenever we would then asked Skybound, they would said “no.”

Make of that what you will.”

For those who may not know, Skybound is Robert Kirkman’s production company. It started out publishing comic books, but includes movies and TV. It also has a video game publishing arm called Skybound Games, which remains active today. Aside from managing video game rights for The Walking Dead, they had recently published games like Slime Rancher, and the classic Beamdog Dungeons & Dragons games, including Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment.

So it’s not like Skybound is not involved in making video games now. Their choice to pull and not rerelease Overkill’s The Walking Dead is deliberate.

While some fans would want to see the game brought back, either to see the developers fix it to the best of their ability, or for video game preservation, they may not convince Skybound to do so. Whatever the case, it remains a notorious entry in the annals of bad video games.