Top 5 Trailers of This Generation

Who doesn’t love a high quality trailer? Getting hyped up for a game based on a killer video has a special place in all gamers’ hearts. In the course of this console generation, there have been some terrific trailers and those that just sucked ass. Who cares about the latter — we want to show you our top 5 trailers of this generation. We spent a good deal of time whittling down the list to those that we really loved — ones that we watched over and over both before a game’s release and after. What are you waiting for? Get watching!

Gears of War

The Gears of War “Mad World” trailer still holds the honor of being the best trailer I’ve ever seen. Epic Games and Microsoft picked the absolute perfect song and strung together a great sequence of shots to give you an enormous emotional connection to Marcus Fenix and the characters in the game. This trailer is still on my Xbox 360 and I go back and watch it to this day.

Halo 3

You can’t deny that Halo 3 had one of the biggest marketing campaigns of any game to date. Microsoft dropped the hammer with their wallet and produced some amazing trailers, but the “Believe” video series really grabbed our attention. Again, it’s all about emotional response, and this trailer has that in spades. When other game trailers recreate scenes from a previous trailer, you know it’s huge.

Uncharted 2

The first Uncharted was a great success, but didn’t have massive marketing power behind it. When Sony and Naughty Dog revealed Uncharted 2, they made sure to change that fact. One of the most anticipated games of 2009 and winner of multiple Game of the Year awards (including ours), the Uncharted 2 teaser trailer set the bar pretty damn high for everyone else in the industry.

God of War III

God of War III took “epic scale” to a whole new level. Everyone knew Sony would swing for the fences, but when the reveal trailer showed that game levels would take place on the backs of moving Titans, the collective gaming population let out a joyous “Holy Shit!” in unison. Kratos making the jump into high definition would have been enough for a lot of people, but Sony hit this one out of the park.

Bioshock

Bioshock came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. After a huge trailer unveil at Microsoft’s X06 conference and a demo that left our jaws on the floor, Bioshock has turned into an extremely successful series for Ken Levine and 2K Games. We’ll always remember the first time we saw the Big Daddy slam his drill arm into a Splicer’s hand and our first encounter with the massive beasts in the game.

Bonus: Killzone 2

We had to throw the “Bullet” trailer from Killzone 2 in here for good measure. It’s certainly not the first trailer created from the in-game engine, but after all the hubbub about the game’s graphics and the beauty the trailer showed, a lot of skeptics’ mouths were shut. Then, Sony decided to release an demo where you can manipulate the trailer and play around — a giant “F you” to the skeptics and proof that Killzone 2 would be one of the best looking games on the market in 2009.

What do you think about our picks? Did we miss a trailer that you think deserves to be in the top five? Let us know in the comments!