Before YouTube became the default home for game footage, two film-school graduates in Los Angeles built a website that helped turn trailers, reviews and gameplay videos into a central part of video game culture.
Brandon Jones and Geoff Grotz launched GameTrailers.com in 2002, initially treating it as a simple destination for newly released game footage. Their ambitions grew quickly. They wanted to make polished video content rather than merely collect advertising clips, and eventually created a professionally produced editorial operation that rivalled the largest games websites.
From film trailers to game footage
Jones was fresh out of college when he noticed how easily Apple’s movie-trailer hub delivered films such as Mission: Impossible 2 in 720×480 QuickTime video. Games did not yet receive the same convenient treatment. Their promotional material was usually limited to television commercials, event presentations, demo discs or footage hidden behind a subscription service.
That imbalance inspired Jones and Grotz to register inexpensive web addresses and begin uploading game videos. They sourced material wherever they could, including television recordings captured on Jones’s TiVo. The approach existed in a legally uncertain period shaped by the aftermath of Napster, and copyright complaints and cease-and-desist notices were common.
Nintendo, for example, objected to its Super Smash Bros. television commercial appearing online. The advertisement used The Turtles’ “Happy Together”, and the company maintained that the campaign had been cleared for television rather than internet distribution.
Jones also edited trailers himself. A fan-made Enter the Matrix video combined gameplay footage with audio from The Matrix Reloaded. Some viewers believed it was an official advertisement and contacted developer Shiny Entertainment to praise the apparent tie-in. It reached 5,000 views, a significant figure for the young site.
A scrappy site becomes a media company
The founders worked on the project after their regular video-editing jobs had finished. They installed a server at a local hosting business, rendered videos overnight and played Battlefield 2 while they waited. There were no pre-roll advertisements, and Jones added an unauthorised banner for his employer, Hornet Animation, to make the site look more established. The resulting traffic eventually crashed Hornet’s page.
Hornet executive Jon Slusser saw that the project had potential beyond a hobby. Interest in “game trailers” was still developing, but elaborate Blizzard cinematics and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker were drawing curious visitors. Slusser began looking for a buyer, with Ziff Davis among the interested parties, before a much larger media group entered the discussion.
Viacom acquired the site in 2005. The company owned MTV, Spike and Nickelodeon, but the new property was not folded directly into a broadcast network. Instead, it remained a rare digital-first project within the conglomerate, receiving enough funding and freedom to expand with limited direction from above.
That independence helped the team develop a distinctive production standard. Editors and contributors including Daniel Bloodworth, Justin Speer, Ryan Stevens and Shane Satterfield produced original reviews, previews and retrospectives. Their film, animation and acting experience gave the videos a level of polish that was unusual on the web, while Jones’s voice became one of the site’s recognisable signatures.
Building a new kind of games coverage
The site offered a steady stream of material as games appeared, giving space to major first-party releases as well as smaller projects such as Dear Esther. It also became an early home for creators including the Angry Video Game Nerd and took over Geoff Keighley’s Spike TV program Game Head for seven seasons. Jones says Keighley welcomed the rebrand.
For younger audiences, the site joined the same online ecosystem as Newgrounds and Candystand. Parents and friends told Jones that children had to be pulled away from the screen. Yet the company’s success depended on a distribution model that was about to change dramatically.
GameTrailers encouraged Viacom to establish a presence on YouTube, but the company refused. Viacom viewed the platform as a competitor that profited from unauthorised clips, including material from SpongeBob, South Park and The Daily Show. The dispute led to a billion-dollar lawsuit in 2007, followed by an out-of-court settlement seven years later.
As YouTube expanded throughout the 2010s, visitors moved away from standalone media sites. A subscription service called GameTrailers Plus was considered, but Jones was told the closure was already planned. He learned about the decision roughly 18 months in advance and was instructed not to tell his team.
The end of the site and the trailer era
Viacom sold the business in 2014. Its staff were dismissed, and the brand was transferred to IGN in 2016. That same year, Jones and many former colleagues established the subscriber-supported Easy Allies. The venture continues, although Jones left games media in 2022.
The site’s rise and decline mirror the broader history of online games coverage. The industry moved from television commercials, printed magazines and disc-based demos to instant video releases, livestreams and social-media reactions. For more background on the changing arcade and games landscape, explore RETROCADE’s Arcade Blog and collection of arcade videos.
Trailer announcements now arrive through Nintendo Direct presentations, showcase events and Geoff Keighley’s broadcasts. A single reveal can generate millions of wishlists, while a coveted “one more thing” segment can define an entire presentation. Modern audiences even build elaborate theories around the timing of major releases, including the next Grand Theft Auto trailer.
That scale would have been difficult to imagine when the GameTrailers team gathered around an advance copy of the first Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. Jones once chose Shadow of the Colossus for a Viacom presentation because its visual ambition showed what games could become, even if the appeal failed to engage company president Tom Freston.
When Freston appeared bored, Grotz reframed the site’s ambition: they wanted to defeat major competitors such as IGN and GameSpot. Freston immediately responded to the competitive language, saying he liked the idea of “crush them”. The exchange captured both the founders’ determination and the media industry’s growing interest in game culture.
Jones later reflected that technological and entertainment progress always involves loss. GameTrailers disappeared as an independent destination, but its influence remains in the way games are announced, edited, discussed and judged through video. Its audience helped establish the expectation that a trailer could be an event in its own right.
Why this history still matters to arcade fans
For arcade enthusiasts, the lesson is familiar: presentation shapes how people experience games. Whether you are choosing a full cabinet, a compact bartop arcade or planning a home setup, the screen, sound and controls all contribute to the story a machine tells.
Those building or restoring a machine can compare arcade parts and consult RETROCADE’s Arcade Machine Buying Guide before committing to a project. The technology has changed since 2002, but the basic idea has not: the right presentation can make people stop, watch and care.
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