10 Ways Video Games Keep Lying To You

Not to be too dramatic, but the E3 2005 "gameplay" trailer for Killzone 2 kinda broke the industry. We were more naive then, so as we watched what looked like a staggering leap forward in technology, we were also skeptical. Like they say, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

And boy was it. As we suspected all along, the alleged gameplay trailer was entirely, in industry terms, "bullshot" - pre-made imagery sold to viewers as the game itself. Essentially, it was a cutscene that depicted what next-gen shooters at the time could, hypothetically, look like.

Completely fake. An indisputable lie.

Since then, the term "vertical slice" has been used to justify a similar practice: showing a pre-made demo of an actual game, but rendering only what's on camera, often on a mighty PC dev kit. Technically it is a peek at real gameplay, just not an accurate representation of the whole product.

Worse, making these demos takes time from developers who could be working to make the actual game better. All for a brief demo reel that we've become too jaded to ever take seriously.