The team from GameTrailers.com had prepared a video review of Shadow of the Colossus for Viacom president Tom Freston. It was a demonstration of what games were becoming capable of. Fumito Ueda’s PlayStation 2 masterpiece departed from stereotypical gunplay and cartoon platforming for something more bespoke in its brushstrokes. The cut was also to demonstrate what Brandon Jones and his crew, far more skilled with editing than other websites, were hoping to accomplish with more resources. To grow beyond a place to merely watch the latest in gaming commercials.
The room was filled with well-wishers, but Freston, then pushing 60, was visibly growing bored. Regardless of their growing craft, he ultimately didn’t care about video games. Geoff Grotz, GameTrailersco-founder, intervened. “We look at our major rivals online, like IGN and GameSpot,” said Grotz, “and what we really want to do is crush them.”
“Crush them,” replied Freston, lighting up. “I like that.”
Departing from the traditional media merger story, the acquisition of the scrappy GameTrailersby the conglomerate that owned MTV, Spike and Nickelodeon was an agreeable one. While the page began as a hub for new game footage in 2002, they refined themselves into an institution, producing well-regarded video reviews, previews and retrospectives. There were no algorithms to game, just a feed of games as they emerged, and they gave equal oxygen to first-party blockbusters and emerging indies like Dear Esther. It was momentarily home to some of the more spartan digital media creators, like the Angry Video Game Nerd, and it took over Geoff Keighley’s Spike TV show Game Head for seven seasons; a rebrand that, Jones tells me, was welcomed by Keighley.
They were a unique case. Obviously young viewers were invested in video games, butlers was given the rare long, well-funded leash
“Yoink”
In 2002 Brandon Jones was fresh out of college and living in Los Angeles. Like many in his circumstances, his evening rituals revolved around macaroni and cheese, Final Fantasy, and checking for updates on Apple’s movie trailers hub. Before YouTube was even a glimmer, it was Apple of all places that provided the latest film trailers. Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 2 hyped up moviegoers in glorious 720×480 QuickTime quality.
Video game promos were hardly as sophisticated. You had whip-crack, often gross-out TV commercials, and then lengthier hype reels for exclusive industry events and presentations. Beyond that, juicier trailers and gameplay footage were bound to demo discs or IGN’s bygone paywall.
“I asked my friends, ‘Why can I get movie trailers for free, but I have to pay money for video games?’” Jones tells me on a call. He and Grotz began hoovering up dirt cheap URLs. “My buddy suggested GameTrailers dot com, and just as a larp we should just start uploading stuff. Unapologetically stealing from IGN and GameSpot. If it was widescreen enough we would crop out the watermark. Yoink.”
Sourcing video game trailers in 2002 required a bit of creativity. On top of plundering other sites, Jones would program his TiVo to record broadcasts that often ran game commercials. While the modern hype circuit is almost solely built on pushing trailers online, it was the Wild West back then. The Napster era was fresh in litigious minds. Cease-and-desists were a regular occurrence. Nintendo wasn’t chuffed to see their Super Smash Bros. commercial online, the one featuring The Turtles’ “Happy Together.” “They’d explain that those ads were for television, not the internet,” says Jones. “Companies didn’t call us, or they did, and when they did it was bad.”
Being a video editor by trade, Jones wasn’t above just cutting a trailer himself. He recalls causing a small frenzy making what was essentially a fan video for Enter the Matrix,stapling audio from The Matrix Reloaded onto whatever gameplay clips he scrounged together. Many confused it for official advertising, even reaching out to EtMdeveloper Shiny Entertainment to congratulate them on their exciting looking tie-in. The video generated 5,000 views, which Jones considered a lot. He wasn’t the only one impressed.
I Want My GTTV
“We would do our video editing jobs, wait for all of our coworkers to go home, render trailers and play Battlefront II overnight.”
Jones tells me they weren’t really thinking about the financial viability of what they were maintaining. They had to manually install their server at a local hosting joint. They weren’t running pre-roll ad spots. To lend things an air of professionalism, Jones added a banner linking to his boss’s company, Hornet Animation, to the site. Without permission. The traffic ended up crashing Hornet’s page. Jones’ boss, Jon Slusser, asked him to meet for lunch. There was something he wanted to discuss.
While the idea of there even being “game trailers” was still nascent, Blizzard’s increasingly sophisticated animated openings and the stunning visual departure of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker led curious fans to the page. Slusser proposed turning GameTrailers into a larger enterprise. He was more entrepreneurial, and Jones hadn’t intended for the site to become a full-time gig. Still, he kept seeing filmmaker friends pour thousands into projects just to be ignored, while his stray website steadily grew. Plus, he loved hearing gossip about how mad it was making folks at GameSpot.
Slusser began shopping for a buyer, mostly looking at other games media organizations. Ziff Davis was apparently a very interested party. Then a bigger fish started nibbling, with Stosser one day telling him, “we’re going to New York tomorrow.”
ated into broadcast or MTV per se. GameTrailers would continue to be a digital-first project, the only one of its kind atno other digital-first projects within the company to bounce ideas off of, GameTrailers would expand on its own terms
Many major media groups were still a little tingly from the dot-com crash, but knew they needed a digital foothold. Jones’ understanding was thatve to.” In fact,uing a MySpace purchase hard enough
Under Viacom, a new editorial team was established to create original material. This included the likes of Daniel Bloodworth, Justin Speer, Ryan Stevens, and Shane Satterfield as their first editor-in-chief. With professional editing and animation backgrounds, the videos they produced were of a significantly higher quality than what was coming from elsewhere on the web. Plus, with some stage acting under his belt, Jones was the most comfortable in the recording booth, and his voice soon became a signature of the site. (He regrets not getting his face in front of the camera as well.) Friends and family were telling Jones they had to pry kids away from GameTrailers, with the site joining the computer lab pantheon alongside Newgrounds and Candystand.
Amid all this success, however, there was one cause for concern. Many video sharing platforms had come and gone, but a new site called YouTube was growing with a speed, growth and culture that seemed to rival that of Facebook. The social media era was beginning. GameTrailers pressed Viacom to set up some shop there, but that was apparently one line their owners refused to cross. To Viacom, YouTube wasn’t just a media rival, but a crook, plundering clips from SpongeBob, South Park and The Daily Show, warranting a lawsuit in 2007 to the tune of a billion dollars. The two would end up settling out of court seven years later.
The people who go wild when Ace Combat gets announced
Flash forward a few years, and as YouTube’s gravity became impossible to escape in the 2010s, Jones tells me the writing was essentially on the wall. Traffic to standalone sites like theirs was plummeting. There were plans to create a subscription version of the site, GameTrailers Plus, but someone at Viacom warned Jones that no matter what, they were being shuttered. Worst of all, Jones was given a heads-up on the impending closure a year and a half in advance, but instructed not to tell his team.
d branding passed along to IGN in 2016. Today it’s little more than a header on a YouTube channel, where more bombastic influencers rule gaming. That same year, Jones and much of the former GameTrailers staff launched a new subscriber-supported venture, Easy Allies, which continues to this day, though Jones retired from games media in 2022
“That’s the sad reality that I’ve come to terms with over the years,” says Jones. “The advancements in technology and entertainment always involve loss.”
Once upon a time, the GameTrailers crew giddily huddled around their advance copy of the first Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. Since then, the focus placed on these charmed video files has grown substantially. We’ve advanced to the point that there are entire conspiracies around when a new Grand Theft Auto trailer will drop, with Netflix treating its impending broadcast of our next look at the game like the Super Bowl.
There are new rituals around trailers beyond just checking your favorite site. Now there are Nintendo Directs. Panel reactions. Before GameTrailers TVand since, Keighley has dedicated his life towards broadcasting these things. The weight these things now carry can propel a game onto a million wishlists, but can also leave games crushed, with the coveted “one more thing” spots at the Game Awards sometimes serving as a walk to the gallows.
All those years before, Jones had led hisiful game, even if that beauty is lost on media moguls. Today Geoff Keighley, the current king of game trailers, seemingly sees craft in even the most derivative, doomed live-service vessels. “That kind of energy is not leading to things being acquired,” says Jones. “It’s all about the eight people in the back who go wild when Ace Combat gets announced.”
The story you just read is part of the 2002 edition of Warp Week, a Kotaku series that takes readers back to gaming’s past through a mix of time-dilated reviews, retrospectives, and on-the-ground reports.
🕹️ Level up your inbox
Don’t miss the latest reviews, news and tips. Sign up for our free newsletter.
