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Franchise As A Whole
- Killer App: The series has always prioritized Xbox consoles over others, and as such, they've become associated with the brand, with Microsoft even handling publishing duties for 3 and 4.
- Referenced by...: Fear & Hunger: Termina has Karin Sauer, a journalist who spent some time as a war reporter, try to prove her credibility by saying that she's "Covered wars, you know", the Character Catchphrase of Frank West.
- Troubled Production: As noted below, the series endured this non-stop from Dead Rising 3 onwards, and it played a major role in its decline and eventual death.
- What Could Have Been: Post-Dead Rising 2, the series has gone through many trials and tribulations, which help explain the decline in quality. These
two videos go into extensive detail concerning Capcom's management of the series and more, but here are some of the major notes.- Dead Rising 3 was originally in development for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but the scale of the game was far too ambitious, and the extremely complicated process of working with the PS3's hardware was setting Capcom Vancouver back so much that they almost considered giving up completely. It wasn't until Microsoft offered an exclusivity deal with a much bigger budget and marketing campaign as a launch title for the Xbox One that they decided to pull through with the project.
- Microsoft wanted an exclusive to compete with Sony's hit zombie title, The Last of Us. They approached Capcom Vancouver, of which they had a deal where they would be the first publisher Vancouver would reach out to concerning any new major Dead Rising projects. Vancouver pitched a project by the codename "Climber"note , which was a Darker and Edgier complete Continuity Reboot of the series, taking heavy inspiration from the game it's trying to compete with, as well as other zombie media such as The Walking Dead. It aimed to be much more grounded in reality with almost no comedic undertones from the previous games, more plausible and realistic Combo Weapons, and a bigger emphasis on stealth, also borrowed from guess who. Microsoft was delighted with the idea and Capcom Vancouver was so passionate with the project that it spent about six months on it, but when it was pitched to Capcom Japan, they absolutely hated it and forced them to start from scratch to be more in-line with the original series. Now having very little time to create a completely new game and having suffered major lay-offs as a sort of "punishment" for the Climber pitch, it lead to what we know nowadays as Dead Rising 4.
- A Dead Rising 5 was in development and focused back on Chuck Greene, being an interquel between 2 and 3 and followed him and a now teenaged Katey in another adventure in Mexico explaining how they ended up in Los Perdidos. However, thanks to the lackluster response to Dead Rising 4, switch to Unreal Engine, creative differences, and ultimately the dissolution of Capcom Vancouver, the project ended up being scrapped.
First Game
- Creator-Driven Successor: To Shadow of Rome, or at least Agrippa's action parts. Dead Rising initially started off as a sequel before the first game was even released, but poor sales figures resulted in a complete shift. From the core combat gameplay to the excess Gorn, to even the durability setup and encouragement to use a variety of different items (albeit for different reasons), the influences that carried over are easy to spot.
- Feelies: A DR4-themed snowglobe was given out to those who pre-ordered the game from GameStop.
- The Other Marty: Martin Belafsky was originally slated to play Frank West and recorded some of the lines, but he was eventually moved over to Kent Swanson instead after TJ Rotolo signed on. Belafsky's recording of Frank's iconic "Fan-TAS-Tic" ended up staying in the game.
- Permanent Placeholder: Dead Rising was the working title of the game, but was liked so much by the dev team it became the final title.
- "Take That!" Tit-for-Tat: The "Zombie Genocider" achievement in Dead Rising requires the player to kill 53,594 zombies, or the equivalent of the entire population of Willamette. Left 4 Dead includes an achievement called "Zombie Genocidest", which requires you to kill 53,595 Infected. In response, Dead Rising 2 added the "Z-Genocider 2: Genocide Harder" achievement for 53,596 zombie kills. Some other games have also referenced this, like "Trail of Corpses" in [PROTOTYPE] note , a note in the credits for Bioshock 2 that claims "53,596 zombies were killed during the making of this game", and the "HOPO-cidal Maniac" achievement in Rock Band 3 for "killing" 53,596 hammer-ons and pull-offs.
- What Could Have Been:
- Early alpha and beta copies of Dead Rising arranged their events differently: survivors were found in different places, a couple have different names, and the mall was slightly different. Most notably, Isabella had a sequence where she held off zombies with Carlito's rifle, which is why some promotional shots of her character render show her holding it.
- Keiji Inafune wanted this game to feature Co-Op Multiplayer, but the lack of time and resources surrounding the game’s release left it to be Saved for the Sequel.
