GameTrailers

» see gametrailers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

gametrailers showed up in my browser around 2003. i was twenty and at university in ankara. ttnet adsl had recently replaced dial-up at home, and youtube did not exist yet. if you wanted to actually see a moving image of an upcoming console game, you went to gametrailers.com or you waited for the next demo disc with a magazine. gt was the only video-game site on the english-language web that took video as the primary unit, and the brand was almost entirely associated with the slightly nasal, slightly authoritative voice of brandon jones reading a top-ten list.

geoff grotz and brandon jones launched it in september 2002. mtv bought it in november 2005 in viacom's brief "gaming is the next mtv" period. for about five years after that the site ran one of the better long-form gaming video operations on the web: long-form retrospectives and the annual gametrailers game of the year awards.

youtube became the trailer site by default and twitch took the gameplay side. the whole reason gametrailers had ever needed its own video player evaporated.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

before youtube, video on the web was a misery. realplayer giving way to windows media, each format with its own codec hell. gt was one of the small group of sites that actually figured out how to host video at scale in the dial-up-to-early-broadband window. the site's playback hovered around 480p when most gaming coverage online was a screenshot caption. that small infrastructural advantage gave gt several years of compounding cultural weight before youtube made it irrelevant.

~ the day it died ~

february 8 2016. mtv had been quietly running down its non-music-video properties for two years. the announcement was internal first, public second, and the entire staff was told the site was being shut. about a quarter of the team, brandon jones included, regrouped six weeks later as easy allies on patreon. the timing was precise: gt did the math and discovered that an audience of long-term gametrailers viewers would crowdfund a 60-person operation directly if asked.

~ the next chapter ~

ign later picked up the gametrailers brand and youtube channel, but only as an archive plus occasional new trailers. the actual operation that was gametrailers (the staff and the show formats) is now easy allies, still going as a patreon-funded gaming media co-op. that is one of the few graveyard-to-co-op transitions on the web that actually worked, and it is the only piece of the gt story most people under thirty have any reason to know about.

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