State of Decay 3 was first revealed back in 2020 ahead of the launch of the Xbox Series X/S with a cinematic trailer that showed no gameplay. The teaser signaled loftier narrative ambitions for the zombie sandbox series but the truth is that the game didn’t even exist yet, outside of broad outlines and attempts to prototype what Undead Labs’ next sequel would look like. Studio head Philip Holt recently confirmed that the trailer was essentially fake and said its zombie deer are not on the menu for the finished game.
“So that trailer, there really wasn’t a game or game team when we were working on that trailer, like, it was so early,” Holt said in a new interview with Sunny Games after State of Decay 3‘s May 2026 alpha playtest was revealed. “You know, the game was in a Word document,” he said, adding that the core development team was less than a dozen people at the time.
“It was really the very beginning of [the] software,” Holt continued. “The trailer was done by Blur, it was all pre-rendered. It represented, I think, a concept, our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3. And as we’ve had a chance to build a team and get going on the game, some of those elements I think are gonna persist in the game that we deliver and some of those things are just, like, we’re not doing zombie animals.”
As Kotaku reported back in 2022, Microsoft was going around to its studios asking for trailers in 2020 to build hype for its next console generation. Current and former developers on the game said they were surprised by what was shown, including a zombie deer that showed up in the trailer and led fans to believe infected animals would be one of the sequel’s new features. The showcase included reveals for games like Rare’s Everwild, which was later canceled, and Playground’s Fable, which is only scheduled to release this fall. “We didn’t want to announce the game because we didn’t even know what it was at that point,” one State of Decay 3 developer told Kotaku at the time.
This is hardly the first time a game reveal was rushed. Microsoft infamously showed off an Xbox One reboot of Phantom Dust using a pre-rendered trailer that was untouched by the developers at Darkside who were actually making the game. It was never released. Issues like this are why lots of game trailers now include disclaimers about whether they’re in-engine and many players say things like “no gameplay, no hype.”