Tribes: Ascend release date and more celebrated with tribute to Dead Island trailer

Hi-Rez has announced that Tribes: Ascend will be graduating from beta to 1.0 come April 12. The shooter, a free-to-play reboot of the jetpack-fueled tournament-FPS series that began as a Earthsiege spinoff in 1998, has been in beta-testing since last November, building up a tester-base of some 400,000 players ahead of next month's full, free-to-play launch.

Hi-Rez has elected to mark the occasion by sneaking into Techland's archives (possibly with the aid of jetpacks) and stealing that Dead Island trailer which got everyone so hot under the collar last year. Seeings as that clip's already been tweaked to represent Minecraft, Mad Men and Shaun of the Dead, it's about time someone used it to sell a multiplayer action game, right? Besides, one suspects the Zombie Apocalypse would go very differently if everyone had effin' jetpacks...