The Best and Worst Trailers of 2011

It's appropriate that, in a culture obsessed with brand identity and competing corporations, the next best thing to playing a game is watching an extended commercial for one. There are no framerate issues or frustrating controls in the future, only dreams perpetually on the cusp of coming true.

2011 was a banner year for game trailers, with companies pitching a range of games across the industry's most diverse group of platforms since the mushrooming of personal computers in the early '80s. It was a year of terrific highs and bizarre lows, of selling cinematic fantasies that would never match gameplay and capturing gameplay in the most evocative and excitable moments. These are the five best and worst video game trailers from 2011.

The Best

Dead Island's trailer was an emotionally spectacular retelling of the last few moments of a girl's life, killed by her own father after she'd turned into a zombie on what was supposed to be a peaceful family vacation. The trailer runs in reverse, magically lifting her off the ground and pulling her backward through time, intercut with footage of her father swinging an axe to ward off the zombie horde that have him cornered. The setting and enemies are cliches of cliches, yet the trailer's elegiac tone made it seem like there was new life in the old setup. Everyone's played a game where you kill zombies for laughs, but who's played one where zombie's break your heart, push you into a corner, and force you to kill your own daughter? For imagining that possibility, Dead Island immediately went from being a boring zombie game no one could remember to the most talked-about project of the winter.




It was an open secret that DICE was working on Battlefield 3 and when the first full trailer was finally shown in February it felt like a barn buster. The trailer brilliantly incorporated the anticipatory fervor in its structure, combing the heavily digitized sound of a helicopter blade with an ominous bass swell that, by the end, turned into a speaker-busting blast so loud it seemed to short out the whole system. This was further underscored by the single-second moments of gameplay that captured the immersive first person animations and spectacular action. It suggested a kind of post-traumatic stress-disorder flashback to something terrible and not yet fully understood. The impression was of a game so powerful your senses would be literally overwhelmed. Battlefield 3's trailer made an overly familiar genre seem instantly refreshed, on the verge of complete rebirth.




By every convention of what passes for wisdom in the video game industry, Catherine should have failed. Instead it became the best-selling title in Atlus's 20 year history, the result of its fantastically surreal trailers. Rather than trying to trick audiences into thinking the game matched some already popular genres, Atlus embraced its impossible to categorize story and gameplay, a modernized iteration of Q-bert wherein the hero is a tortured monogamist who grows sheep horns in his sleep and sometimes imagines his girlfriend is a demon. Atlus embraced the game's unusual character by blasting composer Shoji Meguro's remix of the William Tell Overture for its North American reveal trailer. In a time when many publishers try to make their trailers appear the same but better than the competition, Catherine found an enthusiastic audience with a trailer that was different and confrontational.




It's hard to sell a mood. Getting people excited for a setting and the feeling it evokes is one of the great riddles of game marketing but Grand Theft Auto V's reveal did the trick. Set to "Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake" by The Small Faces, GTA V's trailer was little more than a series of lifestyle moments across the sprawl of a fake Los Angeles: joggers on the boardwalk, oil dereks in the foothills, hiking in the mountains, a mid-afternoon golf game, a bank robbery, prostitutes loitering in front of liquor stores, suburban homes with foreclosure signs, and a voice over that leads to the ending view of a wealthy mobster (is it Claude? Tommy?) looking out over it all from a hillside mansion. Los Santos is the place where prosperity began to fall apart, and GTA V purports to be its story. Sold.




How do you make a trailer for a behavior game on Facebook? The Sims Social was revealed at E3 2011, where it had to compete with spotlight-hogging heavyweights like The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3. The result was a surprisingly direct and vibrant trailer that stood out as an exciting piece of counter-programming. The trailer imagines two girlfriends gossiping about a guy one of them wants to date. She subsequently invites him on a Sims date in Facebook. After their avatars have dinner and watch a movie, the winsome couple decide to do what couples do, and end up taking a shower together. The trailer was a terrific demonstration of how The Sims gameplay merges with Facebook's chat and invitation features. And it was also a pleasant, if blunt, reminder that video games can offer pleasures other than the hero-of-the-world sort we're too often given.