Coinbase’s new retro game-world advert is jam-packed full of “oh that’s clever” practical craft, giving it more punch than a polished CG edit would.
GTA-adjacent live-action figures who move with the stiff, uncanny old NPC style PS2 and PS3 aesthetic, under flat skies and inside a world built to look digitally wrong on purpose.
And with GTA VI looming, the references that are peppered through this one land rather splendidly.
The physicality of Real actors on Real sets, with Real costumes, flattened and warped until everyone looks like a low-resolution texture dragged from a twilight zone, is awesome. Bodies twitch, stall and loop like background characters running on broken code.
Particularly love the mirror practice bits.
That is the smart inversion that takes using digital tools to fake reality and flips it, reversing it so they use reality to fake bad digital that is less slick and stranger. But much more.satisfying as you can see the grubby fingermarks in every frame. You can feel the effort.
With people no longer seeing machine-tooled technical perfection as proof of craft, the frictionlessness is just massively disposable. This one goes the opposite way and looks built, designed, and moulded into shape through decisions.
While plenty of current work borrows from gaming culture, this does not just lift the codes; it recreates the feeling retro game worlds offer. The stiff, crude, slightly dead-behind-the-eyes style of N64’s Goldeneye gives it weight and carries the concept.
Coinbase’s whole idea is to help users escape from a rigged system, and the old NPC aesthetic turns that into something you can feel.
Not style over substance, but an idea properly rendered.
