The trailer was planned to launch as part of a press event in New York at the beginning of April where Crytek's founder and president Cevat Yerli, and the EA team would show playable code and hold a Q&A with the assembled journalists from around the world. We knew that there would be a high degree of anticipation for the trailer from the Crytek fan boys and Crysis community, but we didn’t want to take any chances with this – it needed to make as big an impact as possible in its opening week.
We designed a special stunt event to give a “first look” glimpse of the trailer to hard-core fans, and create awareness of the main launch of the trailer on the following Friday. A late night screening on the HD jumbotrons in Times Square was arranged, screening a clip from the trailer and heralding the launch of the site www.sosnewyork.com where the whole trailer would be released. From a small tweet,a twitter storm blazed across the whole gaming community, and in hours the buzz about this multiplied as fans from all over New York arrived in Times Square, many to film the event themselves and pass it on around the world. From one screen and a few seeded Tweets we got around a hundred fans out on a cold Tuesday night in NYC – they went home and posted the story to over 100+ game sites including Kotaku, 1Up, IGN and Destructoid. They blogged, and in the following days they generated close to 2000 tweets, 600 new Twitter followers and over 1200 new Facebook fans. The shaky handheld video some of these fans shot is all over YouTube with one clip alone seeing 330,000 views in a matter of days.
One screening, one evening, on one screen for a few thousand bucks generated worldwide buzz days before the full trailer was even launched.
On the Friday the whole of Maverick watched as the trailer just flew, it was impossible to keep tabs on all the postings and comments, but it was obvious that it was going down a storm. It was great just to keep pressing refreshing and seeing the number of views increasing and the number of postings on Google leaping (still I get a small kick to put in "Crysis "The Wall"" into Google and see 308,000 results). It was rewarding to read that so many of the comments related to how emotional the trailer made people feel, how much the music worked for them, how much it just made them so eager to get in to the game and go and give the Aliens some pay-back. It was the validation we had all sought. In over six months of intense work on this project, in the obsession over details, in the production challenges, and in the sheer hard work it had required to get the project completed, we had almost forgotten the initial emotional impact we all experienced the first time we presented the treatment; now we could see that shared by the audience – the people we made the trailer for. People remember emotion better than details and we’ll hope they’ll still remember how they felt when they first saw the trailer when the game is released later this year.
This project is thanks to some great people who all worked hard to get this done; to EA who have been great clients; Gary, Darren, Matt, Rob, Dan and John who backed this idea, with whom we shared the vision, and who stuck with us through to the end. Thanks to Crytek; Cevat, Frank, Campbell and all the team there who allowed us to come in and make our contribution to their fantastic IP. And special thanks to all the people that have helped Maverick; the Headstrong team and our animators, modellers and effects guys, Polly, Neil and the guys at EMI, Ross and Bridget at Aardvark and to all the many Maverick’s without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.
Will Jeffery - Maverick
BTW - You can see some of these people interviewed in a clip we made and EA just released about the Making Of here:
19:49:15
