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Dead Island's Zombie Bait Catches Trouble

Deep Silver's idea to include a bikini-clad headless, armless and legless zombie torso statuette in their Zombie Bait collectors edition of Dead Island Riptide for Europe and Asutralia seems to have only succeeded in catching controversy as public sentiment has come down decidely against the idea

Deep Silver has just released the following message via their twitter account:

"A statement on the Zombie Bait Edition: 

We deeply apologize for any offense caused by the Dead Island Riptide “Zombie Bait Edition”, the collector’s edition announced for Europe and Australia. Like many gaming companies, Deep Silver has many offices in different countries, which is why sometimes different versions of Collector’s Editions come into being for North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. 

For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island.

We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver's entire international team today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again."

Considering that Dead Island is a horror videogame centered around zombies attacking and tearing apart vacationers on a tropical island, it is not such a stretch to understand how they came up with the idea to use a bathing suit clad victim for the collectors statuette.  Hard to believe there was any malicious intent - just a promotion that failed to anticipate an unforeseeable social media snitfit. While Deep Silver has no choice but to address the negative PR in a contrite manner, it really seems like much ado about nothing when taking the genre and storyline into context.

Dead Island Riptide will be released on April 23rd and can be pre-ordered now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

All original content is copyright © 2010-2016 Michael Sajkowicz. All other content is owned by their respective rights holders and used respectfully and with appreciation in an editorial manner under fair use for the purposes of commentary, criticism and reporting.