GTA Vice City: Sunderland — scroll trailer website

GTA Vice City: Sunderland is an independent studio project, and nobody commissioned it. The brief I set myself: make the kind of launch website a big game trailer gets, the ones where you scroll and the film plays under your thumb, but set it on Wearside after dark instead of in Miami.

It is an unofficial parody. It is not made by, affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive, and the footer says so in plain words, along with the note that the cars are shown without any manufacturer being involved.

The centrepiece is a 36-second chase trailer with no dialogue: Roker from the air at sunset, a borrowed grey Porsche at the kerb outside a seafront pub at Seaburn, a black Range Rover switching its lights on behind it, then traffic cars, a police helicopter and the sea front in the rain, ending on the title.

The places are real and in the right order: north over the Wearmouth Bridge, Roker Terrace under the helicopter’s beam, back down the front past Roker Pier. Every shot was made with AI video tools, then held to a continuity sheet: the same number plate front and back, the damage building in order, the police always behind the car, never in front.

The homepage title sits over the trailer, and scrolling plays it, frame by frame, forwards and backwards. The hero holds still while you scroll through two and a half screens of the trailer, then lets go and the page carries on as normal.

To keep that smooth, every frame of the scroll file is a keyframe, so the browser can jump straight to any moment without decoding the frames before it, and the whole clip is downloaded before scrubbing starts. If the download is slow or fails, the page does not wait: it gives up after a few seconds and streams the trailer instead, so nobody is left looking at a loading bar.

A wide trailer squeezed onto a phone either crops out the action or shrinks to a strip. The phone gets its own file: the aerial opening fills the screen, then the rest of the trailer plays whole in a band, with a soft, darkened copy of itself filling the space above and below. It is a separate, smaller file, so a phone downloads less than half of what a desktop does.

Nothing plays until you ask. Enter after dark turns on a looping music track, and a Music on and off button stays in the corner. The music pauses when you switch away from the tab and steps aside when you watch the trailer straight through, which plays with its own soundtrack: engines, rain, British sirens, the helicopter and the impacts, cut to the picture.

Below the trailer the page scrolls normally: the story in five stills, the crew, the cars, and a map of the chase drawn from OpenStreetMap data, from the pub at Seaburn to Roker Terrace. The story is fiction. The roads are not. It closes on a muted loop of the searchlight run that only plays while it is on screen.

A launch-style trailer site with a Sunderland accent: a chase you play with your thumb, a phone cut of its own, sound only when you want it, and a page that is quick to get going.

There are no sales figures or reviews here, because it is an independent studio project. What it shows is what a business gets when the film, the build and the speed are treated as one job. Open GTA Vice City: Sunderland on your phone and scroll the trailer yourself.