A developer who once worked for Rockstar Games recently revealed the company's unique secrets for producing trailers for the highly popular "Grand Theft Auto" series. While most game manufacturers are keen on holding grand conferences at the Summer Game Festival, TGA Awards Ceremony or Gamescom, Rockstar has always been unique.
According to David O'Reilly, a former employee who participated in the early development of "GTA5", "Red Dead Redemption 2" and "GTA6", despite Rockstar's strict confidentiality, internal employees are actually well aware of the production of the new trailer. "The release of the trailer is absolutely a top priority," O'Reilly said. "The whole company will enter a state of emergency, and any bugs that affect the trailer must be resolved immediately. Sometimes you will be excited and prepared in advance, and sometimes you will be caught off guard and find out, 'Oh my God, the trailer was suddenly released!'"
In order to create a perfect trailer, the team needs to invest a lot of energy in special optimization. O'Reilly revealed that during production, the camera position of each shot will be accurately planned, and the entering area will be frantically polished, while the scene outside the frame may still be in a rough state. "Those parts that are not in the shot will not be refined at all, so the actual game world is far from the level of the trailer." He explained, "This is why there are differences between the final product and the trailer. It is unreasonable to ask manufacturers to show the final effect through trailers before it is completed, but there are always people who are happy to compare and criticize frame by frame."
Unlike movie trailers that are directly edited into films, the production of game trailers such as "GTA6" is more collaborative. The team needed to do additional work on the visible parts of the shot to make it more complete than the actual development progress. This can be verified by looking back at the first trailer of "GTA5" - it was stunning by the standards of the time, but if you look at it frame by frame, you will find that the details of the distant scenery are rough, and there are even some speeding vehicles rushing straight into the abyss of unfinished modeling. Of course, these are not prepared for 4K frame-by-frame viewing. This revelation undoubtedly opens up a corner of the mystery of Rockstar for us.