Six years ago, Microsoft put a zombified deer on screen during an Xbox Showcase and let the internet spend half a decade speculating about undead wildlife in State of Decay 3. Turns out there was never anything behind it. In an interview with content creator Sunny Games, Undead Labs studio head Philip Holt confirmed that when that reveal trailer dropped in July 2020, the game itself barely existed.
"There really wasn't a game or a game team when we were working on that trailer," Holt said. "It was so early. There were like four or five people. The game was in a Word document." The trailer was produced entirely by external animation studio Blur, was fully pre-rendered, and represented, in Holt's words, "a concept, our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore." Not a game. A mood board with a budget.
And the zombie deer specifically? Gone. "No zombie deer," Holt says, plainly. For a feature that became the single most-discussed element of the reveal, that's a significant thing to quietly retire in a YouTube interview in 2026. Make no mistake, the deer wasn't a cut mechanic from a real build. It was a sketch that got rendered and shipped as hype.
This isn't entirely surprising in isolation. Previous reporting from 2022 indicated that Microsoft had pushed its developers to produce trailers ahead of the Xbox Series X/S launch, and that Undead Labs didn't even want to announce the game because, as one developer put it at the time, "we didn't even know what it was at that point." Holt's comments now confirm just how literally true that was. The studio was handed a reveal window and filled it with pre-rendered concept work. That's not a creative choice; that's a marketing obligation dressed up as a game announcement.
What the Game Actually Is Now
To be fair, Holt's interview isn't just a damage-limitation exercise. He's also talking about what State of Decay 3 actually contains, which is more than we've had in years. The alpha playtest, announced last week, is set to begin in May and will include four-player co-op, new base-building mechanics, and what Holt describes as a world that's been "picked clean" years after the initial outbreak. Rather than scavenging finished goods, you're hunting for raw materials to craft improvised weapons back at base. Holt mentioned a concept artist who researches the actual circuitry behind improvised devices, including how to turn a tea kettle into a zombie-attracting IED. Credit where it's due, that's a specific and interesting design direction.
The real question is whether six years of near-silence has produced something that actually moves the series forward. State of Decay 2 was a solid foundation that never quite got the sequel treatment it deserved, and the string of CGI trailers since 2020 haven't shown much beyond atmosphere. An alpha playtest is a concrete step, and Holt being willing to sit down for a 48-minute interview after years of radio silence suggests Undead Labs finally has enough of a game to talk about.
The Xbox Games Showcase is confirmed for June 7, and with alpha playtests kicking off a month before it, State of Decay 3 showing up there in some form seems likely. Whether what they show looks like a game worth the wait is a different question entirely.
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