Once upon a time, a movie trailer was something studios threw together as an afterthought. The movie was the important thing, and trailers—while also important—were a necessity that was dealt with and forgotten. But somewhere along the way that changed, and trailers began to take on a life of their own.
A good trailer can build hype for a film which is vitally important these days, while a bad trailer could prevent people from seeing a great film. When a Hollywood movie releases a trailer, it is done with a budget set aside for it, and with an eye on creating the best looking trailer—not necessarily the most accurate portrayal of the film. That isn’t so much a criticism of trailers these days, as a simple observation that the people creating the trailer, whether it be the filmmakers themselves or a third-party company, put a lot into these clips. Recently, that trend has caught on with video games, and the trailers coming out these days are looking more and more incredible.
Earlier this year Dead Island showed us how it is done when they hired a third-party company to create the trailer for their upcoming game. The clip was entirely animated just for the trailer and it showed nothing from the actual game, but it was so successful that it started a minor bidding war over the movie rights even though the game had yet to show off any gameplay, was still months from release, and as recently as last year most had written the game off. To say that the trailer had an impact is wildly understating it.
The upcoming first-person shooter Prey 2 seems to have learned that lesson well. In the live-action trailer below, you have to wonder how much cash the developers and publishers dropped on the clip. If the trailer has the response that Dead Island did, it was money well spent.
Check out the trailer and look for Prey 2 on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2012.
