Axis Studios, the Scottish animation and VFX company that produced the 2011 Dead Island rewind teaser, is shutting down; GamesIndustry reports that the studio has ceased production on all current projects, 162 employees have been laid off and the company will go into administration.

In 2011, Axis produced a cinematic E3 premiere teaser that catapulted “Dead Island” to the forefront of public consciousness. Composed of slow-motion and rewind sequences, the trailer showed a family's White Lotus vacation brought to a grisly end by a horde of zombies. Even without any gameplay footage, the response at the time was huge (zombies were still not that well played in 2011)

I ended up not enjoying “Dead Island” very much, but I did buy it, and I'm sure it was because of that teaser. Since then, countless imitations and parodies of Axis' “Dead Island” trailer have left a deep mark on the long-running mold of big-budget games being released with a combination of gruesome violence and moody, meditative background music. Coincidentally, Axis eventually worked on “Gears of War” as well. [Since then, Axis has provided animation and VFX for some of the biggest names in gaming, working on trailers and cinematics for “Destiny 2,” “The Elder Scrolls Online,” “Warframe,” “Magic the Gathering,” and “Halo.” The Elder Scrolls Online, Warframe, Magic the Gathering, Halo, and many others. As the studio's archive site indicates, Axis has also done many VFX credits for TV productions such as HBO's “Chernobyl” and Netflix's “Love, Death and Robots.”

“Axis has recently been affected by declining client projects and rising labor costs,” Alistair McAlinden, one of the co-managers managing Axis' closure for Scottish restructuring firm Interpath Advisory, in a statement to Televisual stated. “The directors worked tirelessly to explore alternatives, but ultimately had to make the difficult decision to seek the appointment of a receiver."

The directors also said that the company's ”management was not in a position to make any decisions regarding the closure of Axis.

In addition to the grim tally of ongoing layoffs and closures plaguing the gaming industry, Axis' closure underscores that the damage is not limited to the game development studios and publishers themselves.