Why am I crying over a damn video game commercial?
I woke up this morning thinking I would be a normal, calm adult. Instead, I find myself slumped over my keyboard, misty-eyed, compulsively texting friends I haven’t spoken to in years about a football video game trailer.
Is this how my parents felt as they watched? coffee commercials in the 90s? Am I having a midlife crisis? Maybe!
That doesn’t stop me from turning inward and answering a question I haven’t been able to answer since breakfast. Why is the trailer for EA Sports College Football 2025 So effective? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do have three guesses:
This trailer had to be excellent. A lot has changed since then NCAA Football 14 the series ended more than a decade ago. The willingness of the NCAA (and EA, as a partner) to exploit unpaid college athletes became a popular and effective talking point in popular culture, from episodes of South Park Unpleasant hearings in Congress. EA’s other football series, Madden, theoretically well-positioned with exclusive rights to NFL simulation games, became a shadow of its former, inventive self. And EA’s reputation – after years of creative failures and studio mismanagement – is now somewhere between the DMV and the dentist.
EA’s marketing team wasn’t about to let this rare, extremely positive opportunity – bringing back a long-requested series involving college athletes – go to waste.
They borrowed from the best. Something about this trailer felt eerily familiar, but it took a few viewings to determine that. It’s this: EA used the GTA trailer template. Very literally. Take a moment to look at the College Football 25 trailer next to the trailer in front GTA6, embedded above.
When Rockstar announces a new GTA game, their goal isn’t to showcase the experience of playing the game, but to create the buzzy, brain-chemical feeling of being in the latest open world. GTA reveal trailers are, at their most skeletal, montages of locals expressing themselves in grand and emotional ways, juxtaposed with beautiful landscapes and iconic architecture.
The format is a natural fit for EA’s College Football series, which juxtaposes the pageantry of the sport with the actual playing of football. Players tap good luck charms on their way to the field. Live animal mascots are on the sidelines. A guy in a Trojan outfit stabs a football field with a sword as if to say, “Fuck off, this is my turf!” I have a damn sword!”
When the Houser brothers founded Rockstar, they wanted to borrow from record labels, who knew that one thing was more important than all else: the right atmosphere. I don’t think it’s an accident College Football 25 trailer uses a version of Guns N’ Roses ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, the song Rockstar used to reveal Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
It has been too long. NCAA Football 14, the previous entry in the series was released over a decade ago – around the time my connection to the series was waning.
Years before, in the mid-00s, NCAA football games had been the glue that bonded me and my roommates in college. We never had the traditional American college football experience – the NYU Violets last played in 1952 – so we built increasingly intense bonds with our favorite teams inside the game, and gradually outside the game. In the last year we often chased each other about USC’s superiority, The Ohio State University and the University of Texas, which we did not visit. Or had even been there.
When we left college and our lives became busy like all adult lives, we let go of our ironic, but non-ironic, fandoms. And with little connection to the teams and less time on our hands, our NCAA Football matchups also faded away. I was sad when EA put the kibosh on the series in 2014, perhaps less because I missed the game than my friends.
So now that I see this trailer, I’m flooded with all the good memories spent on a filthy couch that we dug out of the trash can of a neighboring apartment building. That’s probably the real reason why a video game trailer can make me cry.