How This Year’s Most Exciting Video Game Trailer Was Made

This year’s Summer Game Fest showcased over 100 games. Over the course of a few days, major publishers like Microsoft showed off flashy games and trailers, while independent game developers showcased solo projects and everything in between. It’s not simple to stand out in such a crowd, even if you have a ton of resources to make a trailer. What’s an indie studio to do with all the constraints that come with it? Not to beat For developer D-Cell, this meant a strategic approach was necessary.

“There are two things you can’t know beforehand when it comes to how your trailer will look: what game will be shown right before yours, and how people will react to it” Not to beat Co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon, “We had to make sure we could give ourselves a level playing field regardless of what the previous games were like, which led us to introducing the islands in the trailer — what we internally called our ‘sit down and shut up’ moments.

Tsai gave an example: What if the trailer for a highly anticipated, almost mythical game like Hollow Knight: Song of Silk premiere right before the game’s trailer? You can bet that buzz will carry over into clips of the next game. “You have to make them realize something’s happening, and then as soon as they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, hey, there’s something interesting on screen,’ turn the volume up to eleven and everyone, well, sits down and shuts up,” Tsai said.

And that’s exactly what it’s all about Not to beat trailer did. It starts off sluggish and gentle, a literal and figurative petal in the wind. Co-director RJ Lake told Polygon that the goal was for the trailer to be monotonous at first — even though the game is anything but that. The rhythm game is set in a world where music is illegal… and “you commit crimes,” according to the creator.

“This is a kind of Skinamark thing where this movie is intentionally boring as a rock in the beginning, which forces you to pay attention to anything because it makes even the little moments of ANYTHING happening seem big, which means that if you then give people something that’s REALLY big, that seems really cool, it hits a lot harder as a result,” Lake said. “And in the context of ‘everyone’s throwing the coolest thing in the world at you,’ the only way to force a complete brain reset is to shut up.”

And later Not to beat the trailer cuts to an alarm sound and music starts playing; a pink-haired woman sings into a microphone. There are a few moments when the song picks up speed where you think the rhythm power drop and the action begins, but not — until it does. The music stops and the fight begins: the band members start a huge fight with a policeman.

D-Cell started thinking about the trailer at least two years before its premiere – it was an experience The lake was described in detail in the thread on X in June. (The game was first revealed in 2021 when the Kickstarter campaign launched;$267,402 raised AND demo published.) Several other D-Cell developers X threads have been created to discuss the processas did composer and sound designer Vas, who told Polygon that it was cathartic to finally be able to talk about the trailer and how much thought went into it. “You can’t break the seams of the game too much, because otherwise you ruin it for everyone, but not being able to talk about *anything* can be very isolating,” he said.

Such a process — putting so much time and effort into a trailer — isn’t standard in the video game industry, according to several D-Cell developers. But it’s a fundamental part Not to beatdevelopment.

Everything in the trailer comes directly from the game, which helped justify the amount of work that went into making the trailer beyond the media buzz it would generate. “If we were doing something like a ‘movie trailer,’ there’s no way any of this would fit into our production schedule,” Tsai said.

Not to beatThe marketing, so far, has worked. Lake said the game is the most-wishlisted game by publisher PlayStation; it also set a publisher record for the most first-day wishes. There are plenty of PlayStation users who have also wishlisted the game, he said.

“But that all takes away from the real answer, which is the heart of the matter, which is really that this is important to us,” Lake said, “because it was important to get something that really crystallized the thing that we were creating in the world and showed what it could be for everyone and what the vision for this thing is in a super clear way.”

He continued, “It’s almost impossible to do with text when you’re trying to convey a feeling and a vision that can’t be put into words, but I hope it’s still something that’s easy to understand. And the cold business marketing part after the fact, I hope, just comes naturally when people see it and respond to it. But I want it to happen because people are really excited about this thing.”