I'm Roman Mars from 99% Invisible.

And I'm Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread.

And this is episode four of Hidden Levels, our show about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games.

Roman, are you familiar with the concept of a video game trailer?

Well, I've never seen one, but I'm guessing it's just like a movie trailer, but for

video games.

Ding, ding, ding.

And as advertisements for video games, these things work on me.

I spend a lot of time watching them.

You know, the first video game trailer,

I remember, the one that got me to spend way too much time in high school putting off my

homework and instead booting up, I think, Windows 95 to play a video game was for Warcraft to

Tides of Darkness. The once mighty army of Azarov lay among the blackened and charred remains of stormwind

keep. Those that escaped fled across the great sea, bringing tales of the suffering they

had faced at the hands of the orkish hordes. The game was awesome, if pretty two-dimensional,

but the trailer, the trailer was more three-dimensional.

It actually doesn't look that much like the game.

It had these kind of sweeping camera angles in it, the music that was super epic and kind

of told its own story, just like a good movie trailer does.

That all felt new and different to me

in the video game world. So when I watch this, I mean, this really looks like a movie. It doesn't

look like a video game. Right. It certainly doesn't look like a video game from 1995. Like the camera

...