The first Dead Rising is getting a Deluxe Remaster ahead of its 20th anniversary

Technically a remaster of a remaster

Dead Rising is a proper gem, taking an overdone trope - zombies in a shopping centre - and turning it into a brilliantly quirky and challenging survival game that fully delivers on the madcap joy of using anything you can find to mow down hordes of the undead and then snap photos of them. Truly a proto-Instagram-era Nostradamus. Almost ten years after the first game came to PC, and upsettingly close to 20 years from its debut, the original Dead Rising is coming back in a fresh remaster.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is technically a remaster of a remaster, revamping the 2016 HD Remaster that took the original 2006 game beyond the confines of its Xbox 360 exclusivity - including onto PC. I’m fairly certain Dead Rising was popular enough to make it more than a ‘cult classic’ even at the time, but it definitely channelled the spirit of overly-ambitious and mechanically adventurous cult B-games in a way that often feels sorely lacking nowadays. Plus, I don’t want to consider whether 2006 is now old enough to be defined as “classic”, so let’s move on.

Capcom’s teaser-y teaser for the Deluxe Remaster shows photojournalist and zombie-slayer Frank West arriving at the Willamette Parkview Mall by jumping out of a helicopter. Even in the brief bits of cutscene, it looks noticeably different from even the HD Remaster, from the sharper textures on everything to Frank’s revamped character model. It also sounds like Frank might have a new voice, with the snippets of dialogue re-recorded from original actor TJ Rotolo.

Capcom simply describe the incoming remaster as “an updated release with a brand new look”, so it could be we’ll see some gameplay polishes and additions on top of the fancy visuals. While we don’t know anything concrete yet, it’s fairly safe to guess that some of that modern hardware power will be put to cramming even more zombies onto the screen, too.

The teaser mentions the remaster as being “in 2024”, suggesting we’ll see a release sometime this year, though a potential launch window and platforms are yet to be confirmed.