Video Game Trailers

About a year ago I saw a trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 which would represent another game in the history of GTA games that started way back in 1997. This was an interesting trailer because the last game was released in 2013 so to have another title advertised a decade later was exciting.

Watching this video that earned the disclaimer "may contain content inappropriate for children" I immediately recognized this location as probably being Florida. It had beaches, islands, air boats and bridges connecting it all. Now I don't claim this trailer to be anything amazing, but its already clocked ~250 million views (since December 2023) so perhaps I'm mistaken.

I want to turn the clock back to December 2006 when trailers for the upcoming 2007 release of Halo 3 arrived.

I remember seeing this commercial and being beyond excited as a kid. This was going to be the game after Halo 2, which I still to this day believe was the greatest video game of all time.

This trailer had no game-play footage but instead showed a young Master Chief (John) talking with a childhood friend about what life might exist on other planets. Pretty quickly it transitions to an older John, now Master Chief, who is still dazed from an attack. You can tell a massive artillery is arriving so Master Chief throws down a new equipment to Halo, which became the bubble shield.

Instantly shielding and protecting himself he runs over a cliff exposing an army of enemies (Covenant) waiting for him. This shows the end "FINISH THE FIGHT" with the legendary Halo 3 logo.

This was just the beginning of the advertisements as the next set of ads were code-named "Believe" and took such a unique approach to video game advertisements. It was like these commercials weren't even focused on selling a game - they were telling a story. At this point the greater population knew about Halo & Halo 2 and the rise of modern gaming consoles - so these commercials weren't appealing with in game footage, instead taking a crazy artistic approach to advertising.

The above ad pictured an older retired gentlemen (Major Pawel Czernek) who once fought in the military in the fictitious world of Halo. He was in active duty from year 2551 - 2581 reflecting in a museum about the war. It felt real reflecting about lost friends in war in a way modern societies remember past events. As the camera pans down into the museum diorama you can see the remnants of battle as the narrator asks questions about Master Chief.

This was a commercial for Halo 3 - it was unlike any other video game commercial of that time. Thankfully even two decades later we can find these videos on Halopedia to relive the hype that these commercials introduced.

I started wondering looking back 20 years what other trailers I remembered and Gears of War was one of them.

A trilogy of games (Gears 1-3) that I heavily played and something about this first trailer just felt creepily good. It started off with the Mad World song by Gary Jules then proceeded to have the main character run through a war destroyed city. He jumps through a building to avoid conflict on the streets into a room where hundreds of eyes are looking at him. As he continues to fire into the darkness - a massive pair of eyes approaches which turns out to be a massive spider (Corpser). It looks bleak and over for the character we followed and the trailer cuts to black.

This was a sad trailer with the underlying music and also didn't feature any in-game footage and for trailers around that time - it seemed like the pattern. This was an impactful trailer and for the few times I saw it - people got quiet when it came on.

For some reason this day and age - it may be age or the change of video games themselves I just haven't felt a similar sense of amazement from a video game trailer. The upcoming Bungie game was close, because I know what they've delivered with Halo & Destiny, but the trailer just didn't rise the levels of the above.

This trailer started with an great song and proceeded to tell a story about these cybernetic mercenaries being assembled and then battling in some form of player vs player combat.

With a bunch of new video games coming this year between Marathon and Grand Theft Auto 6 - maybe we will get some memorable trailers.