How this year’s most exciting video game trailer was made
polygon.comMore than 100 games were showcased during this year’s Summer Game Fest. Over the span of a few days, big publishers like Microsoft premiered flashy games and trailers alongside indie devs showing off solo projects and everything in between. It’s not easy to stand out in that sort of crowd, even when you’ve got tons of resources to build a trailer. What’s an independent studio with all the associated limitations supposed to do? For Unbeatable developer D-Cell, it meant being strategic.
“There are two things about how your trailer sits in the showcase that are impossible to determine before the showcase happens — what game is running immediately before yours, and how people react to it,” Unbeatable co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon. “We needed to ensure that we could give ourselves a level playing field regardless of what the games preceding were, which led us to implementing islands in the trailer — what we termed, internally, as ‘sit down and shut-up’ moments.”
Tsai posited an example: What if the trailer for a highly anticipated, nearly mythicized game like Hollow Knight: Silksong premiered right before your game trailer? You can be sure that hype is going to spill over into the next game’s clips. “You need to make them realize that something is happening, and then right as they go ‘Oh, wait, hey something is on screen that looks interesting’ you turn up the volume to eleven and everyone, well, sits down and shuts up,” Tsai said.
And that’s exactly what the Unbeatable trailer did. It starts slow and soft, a literal and figurative petal in the wind. Co-director RJ Lake told Polygon that it was a goal to make the trailer boring to start — despite the game being anything but. The rhythm game is set in a world where music is illegal… and “you do crimes,” according to the developer.
“It’s kind of the Skinamarink thing, where that movie is intentionally dull as rocks at the start, which forces you to pay attention to anything because it makes even the small moments
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