That Green Dude

Hey everyone, first of all, thanks for choosing to read this. Secondly, welcome to a new series of blog posts where I look back at old video game trailers.

Trailers for video games are what get people hyped for video games and they are usually the main way for developers to announce a new title. There are many different kinds of trailers; ones that use CGI, others that use in-game footage or live-action. I’ll be looking back at many trailers for tonnes of games and first up is L.A. Noire.

L.A. Noire’s first trailer (2006)

First of all this trailer looks very different in style to what we finally got when the game released in 2011. It most likely was just for the trailer, but the lighting here is not like what we have in the game. The L.A. Noire that was released with realistic lighting effects, making the most of Rockstar Games’ brilliant world-class technology. What we see here is a darker and more subtle form of lighting and it makes it look like a noir film.

It’s cool to see two characters who are in the final game appear in this trailer. Detectives Cole and Biggs are present and it’s interesting to see that these two characters were a part of the game even back then. The fact that both Cole and Biggs survived L.A. Noire’s long and troubled development makes me happy.

I watched this video again for this article and I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that it looked familiar, too familiar. I’d seen the trailer before but it felt like I’ve seen an alternate version of what happened. I played L.A. Noire again and I discovered why I felt that way.

This trailer is basically Warrants Outstanding, a Patrol case where you run after a man whose warrant is, you guessed it, outstanding. The difference between the trailer and the Patrol case in the game is that Cole wears a “Beat Cop” uniform and is with a different partner in the game.

The biggest difference is the logo which is completely different from the one we ended getting. The logo featured in the trailer has a metallic look to it whereas the one it released with was styled to resemble signage. When L.A. Noire was re-released in 2017 it came with a different logo which has some similarities to the old logo found in this trailer.

The old L.A. Noire logo found in the first trailer for the game.

The logo that the game had when it was released in 2011.

The logo that the game had when it was re-released in 2017.

That’s it for this article. I hope you enjoyed this look back at the first L.A. Noire trailer. The next post in this series will focus on the first trailer for Final Fantasy Versus XIII.