After more than a decade of fan petitions, false starts and a tangle of rights disputes that kept him locked out of the fog, Jason Voorhees is finally here. Behaviour Interactive has confirmed that the Friday the 13th icon slashes into Dead by Daylight on June 16, 2026, arriving as the centrepiece of the asymmetrical horror game's 10th-anniversary celebrations under the in-game name The Slasher.
The killer fans waited a decade for
Jason's road to the Entity's realm has been famously rocky. Years of licensing hurdles — and the shutdown of his own dedicated game less than two years ago — made many players assume the crossover would never happen. The arrival is made possible by a new partnership between Behaviour and Horror Inc.'s "Jason Universe" initiative, the same push that has been steadily bringing the hockey-masked killer back into the spotlight.
His reveal trailer leans hard into the source material, playing out from Jason's first-person point of view as he enters a shed, picks up a machete and dons the iconic mask. A final lightning flash reveals a look modelled closely on his first masked appearance in Friday the 13th Part 3 — a deliberate nod for the slasher faithful.
Omnipresent Evil and Improvised Carnage
Mechanically, The Slasher's power is split across two distinct fantasies. Omnipresent Evil lets Jason vanish and reappear at pallets, vaults and walls to ambush Survivors, channelling the way he always seems to be one step ahead in the films. Improvised Carnage gives him throwable map debris that can stagger Survivors or pin injured targets against walls, rewarding players who read the environment as much as the chase.
It is a kit built to make Jason feel relentless rather than fast, trading raw mobility for the dread of never quite knowing where he will surface next — exactly the tone Behaviour has chased with its most memorable licensed killers.
Try him early, then the full launch
Players got an early look during the Steam public test build, with the full release locked for June 16. Folding the most-requested killer in Dead by Daylight history into the game's 10th-anniversary window is no accident: a decade after launch, Behaviour is using one of horror's most recognisable faces to remind everyone why its trial-by-trial formula has endured. Jason has waited a long time for the fog. On June 16, the campers finally find out what that patience bought him.
