How this year’s most exciting video game trailer was made

More 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 of ANYTHING happening feel big, which means that if you then give people something that’s ACTUALLY big after that, that feels very cool, it hits much harder as a result,” Lake said. “And in the context of ‘everyone is throwing the coolest thing ever at you,’ the only way to force a total brain reset is to get quiet.”

Then the Unbeatable trailer cuts to an alarm beeping, and the music starts; a pink-haired woman sings into a mic. There are a few spots as the song builds where you think the beat might drop and the action will start, but it doesn’t — all the way up until it does. The music drops and the fighting begins: The bandmates start a big ol’ brawl with a cop.

“We still very intentionally kept the island with the start point of the ‘action’ being obfuscated multiple times by different sections of things going on [and] building up over time,” Lake said. “You have a cold open, then you have the logo cards, then you have the singing, and by that point, hopefully, you’ve stopped thinking about whatever you were thinking about and your only question is ‘what the hell am I looking at,’ and by the time you’re asking that question, that’s around when Beat gets slammed to the ground and the action beats finally start. Doing all that makes everything else feel massive in a way it absolutely can’t if you just start, say, with the doubletime portion of the song.”

D-Cell started thinking about the trailer at least two years in advance of its premiere — an experience Lake detailed in a thread on X in June. (The game was first revealed in 2021 when a Kickstarter campaign launched; it raised $267,402 and published a demo.) Several other D-Cell developers created X threads to discuss the process, too, like composer and sound designer Vas, who told Polygon it was cathartic to finally be able to talk about the trailer and how much care went into it. “You can’t break the seam too hard with the game or you end up ruining it for everyone but being unable to talk about *anything* can feel very isolating,” he said.

Such a process — spending so much time and effort on a trailer — isn’t standard in the video game industry, several D-Cell developers said. But it’s a core part of Unbeatable’s development.

“Getting from the boards to the final state, then, is all over the place, because we’re not just making an animated trailer; all of that is part of the thing, which means we’re building stuff [inside the game] for real alongside it,” Lake said. “The actual shots we used changed so, so rapidly while this trailer was being built, just due to the nature of game development being what it is and some stuff being ready sooner or later than we expected it to be, so pulling gameplay capture in becomes a constant set of plates spinning to figure out exactly what those shots are.”

It’s a lot of work, but it’s essential not only to align the vision for the trailer, but to set the tone for the game, too. “And if you have [the game’s voice] as a lock, it really helps center you on what matters when making it,” co-producer Jeffrey Chiao told Polygon. “Of course, knowing how to speak for the game, and how the game should speak for itself, is ultimately key to standing out amongst a crowd — our trailer was meant to especially cement that voice to everyone paying attention.”

Everything from the trailer is straight from the game, which helped justify the amount of work it took to make the trailer, beyond just the hype it’d build. “If we were doing something akin to a ‘cinematic trailer’ there would have been no way any of this would have fit into our production schedule,” Tsai said.

Well, except one thing: Remember that tree from the beginning? Richard Gung, a programmer and VFX artist on Unbeatable, told Polygon that the pink tree from the start was made specifically for the trailer — “a hilarious last-minute team effort.” Tsai drew the tree up quickly after “scrambling around in [a] voice call,” and Gung animated the tree to look like it was gently blowing in the wind: “The cut is so fast you can’t even tell,” Gung said. Tsai said D-Cell was making changes to shots, timing, and music “all the way up to the day of submission.”

Image: D-Cell Games

Unbeatable’s marketing, so far, has worked. Lake said the game is publisher Playstack’s most wishlisted game; it also set a record for the publisher with its day-one wishlist numbers. There are a bunch of PlayStation users who’ve wishlisted the game, too, he said.

“But all of that sort of gets away from the real answer at the core of it, which really comes down to it being important to us,” Lake said, “because it was important to get something really crystalizing the thing we’re making out into the world and showing what it could be to everyone and what the vision of the thing is in a super clear way.”

He continued: “That’s almost impossible to do with text when it’s trying to get across a feeling and a vision that’s not really something you can put into words, but hopefully it’s something easy to understand despite that. And the cold business marketing part of it after the fact hopefully just comes naturally from people seeing that and responding to it. But I want that to happen because people are genuinely really excited about the thing.”