Dead Island made an emotional splash with its debut trailer last month, and various pieces of the game have been slowly unveiled. This now includes the game’s official logo, which has been modified for release in North American regions.
The original, unaltered logo can be seen above, while the new, altered logo is below. The content that was altered concerns the hanging corpse. A representative for developer Deep Silver spoke with IGN and affirmed that the logo had to be altered to show the silhouette of a standing zombie in order to conform to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) restrictions for game art on packages. It should be noted that only the boxart on the game will be altered – it will remain in its original form in all other forms in the game. Only the North America version has been affected by this, as the European version will remain unchanged. The ESRB elaborated on this issue:
The video game industry has set guidelines about the types of content that are appropriate in advertising and marketing materials, which includes game box art. According to those guidelines the depiction in the logo was not compliant…We never censor or dictate in any way what type of content can be included within a game. However, a game’s marketing materials are seen by an audience that is much broader than that which actually purchases the game itself, so we enforce industry-adopted guidelines as to what is suitable for inclusion in these materials.
The altered version of the logo can be seen below. Dead Island is currently scheduled to release later this year (Q3).
