Bend Studio video shows behind-the-scenes of Days Gone development

Some behind-the-scenes content is worth more than many trailers. A few days before the debut of Days Gone, Bend Studio, a Sony studio, published a short video about the game’s development, showing a bit of how the team built the adventure and some curiosities of the process. It is quick, but gives a taste of what was to come.

Days Gone was released on April 26, 2019, as a PlayStation 4 exclusive. The player controls Deacon St. John, an outlaw biker played by Sam Witwer, trying to survive in the US state of Oregon after a pandemic that turned much of the population into Freakers, infected creatures that roam in huge hordes, in a style reminiscent of the film World War Z.

What stands out in the project’s story is the size of the leap for the studio. Bend Studio, known for the Syphon Filter series, went from 50 to 130 employees during the six years of development. Creative direction went to John Garvin and Jeff Ross, and the game was built in Unreal Engine 4. A nice detail: the giant hordes of Freakers were the game’s big calling card, the element that set it apart from other infected stories and that can be seen prominently in the promotional materials of the time.

What came next

Critical reception was divided: the Metacritic average was 71 on PS4. Reviews praised the hordes and Witwer’s performance, but complained about repetitive missions and technical problems at launch. Players, on the other hand, embraced the game: Days Gone stayed three weeks in a row at the top of sales in the UK and totaled 7.32 million units sold by February 2022. The PC version came out on May 18, 2021, with an average of 76, and Days Gone Remastered arrived on PS5 on April 25, 2025, with a permadeath mode and a speedrun mode. The sequel, however, did not happen: Bend Studio even pitched Days Gone 2 to Sony, which turned down the proposal.

Source: Sony Interactive Entertainment, via GamingBolt.