“There’s jobs, there’s careers and then there’s obsessions, and for me, game development is an obsession. I don’t think it’s healthy at all, but I am a brush, I must paint. So for me, I’ve reached the natural end of my arc where I’m just entirely about making video games, and I’m obsessed with wanting to make them better.”
That’s Dean Hall speaking, the New Zealander who created one of the world’s most popular survival games, DayZ. The last time I spoke to him properly was when he was about to leave DayZ. He was going to walk away from the game that made him and return to New Zealand to make a game studio of his own. He knew the news wouldn’t be welcomed openly by players. DayZ had only been out in early access for a few months when Hall announced he was going to leave. His crime: he wouldn’t be there to see development through. But galvanised by recent success, an invincible Hall didn’t mind.
He had a higher calling: to return home, throw money around, hire the right people, and make games a new way – his way. “Everything I touched would be gold and everything would be amazing,” Hall tells me now, in a video call, recalling how he felt back then. He bought a Lamborghini Aventador and featured it gratuitously in videos of his studio RocketWerkz, as if to underline his success, and posted pictures of it, and of himself looking ripped, across social media, like a lifestyle influencer would. The image he projected was one of absolute confidence. This plan of his would absolutely work. “And that’s not what happened,” he says. Today 11 years later, and one studio reboot – and some very near studio closures later – things have certainly changed.
At the heart of it all is Icarus, the co-op survival crafting game which prompted this interview and which, as of last night, we know will be coming to consoles – PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X – early next year. But that game’s been on a journey. It’s been around since 2021, and it was supposed to be Hall’s big return to the survival genre after DayZ. RocketWerkz had released other games before it, such as space station builder Stationeers and virtual reality strategy game Out of Ammo, but these were only precursors to what Hall really wanted to make – a big survival game. So, he restructured RocketWerkz to make it. He closed the original experimental office in sleepy Dunedin and relocated operations to the big city of Auckland and focused everything on making one, bigger, game.