Grand Theft Auto VI trailer ignites fan frenzy after leak; excitement grows for anticipated release

The decision to have a female protagonist in GTA VI is a fantastic one because it sets up a new premise. (Image: Rockstar Games/Take Two Interactive)

In the slightly more than 10 years since the highly praised release of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games, the renowned game developer, has only introduced one new game – that being Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018. Although Red Dead Redemption 2 was groundbreaking in the realms of cinematic gaming, open-world sandboxes, and Western-themed games, a substantial portion of the gaming community has eagerly awaited a successor to the 2013 hit, GTA V.

After years of rumours, leaks (both great and small) and a handful of ports/remasters (including this one), Rockstar announced last month that the first official trailer for its upcoming opus would be launching on December 5 at around 7:30 pm IST. Such was the level of expectation and hype that the message on X (formerly Twitter) announcing the forthcoming trailer broke records for the number of likes it accrued.

Describing the level of anticipation as significant would be a vast understatement. Fast forward to the day of the trailer launch, approximately 15 hours before the eagerly awaited reveal, a message surfaced. It suggested that the promotional material had been leaked, and in response, Rockstar Games was compelled to expedite its official launch.

Set to Tom Petty’s Love Is a Long Road, it’s less a trailer in the conventional sense than a teaser that vaguely sets the mood and situates you within the universe you will ostensibly occupy in Grand Theft Auto VI. There is a great deal of significance in the fact that this is the first official audiovisual confirmation of the existence of an eighth mainline entry (I count Vice City and San Andreas as standalone mainline titles) in the GTA franchise. Equally notable is Rockstar’s confirmation of at least one of the upcoming game’s protagonists and the locales of Vice City and its surrounding areas as the setting.

Who and where

As anyone familiar with news reporting knows, the five Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) and the one H (How) are crucial elements when telling a story. To some extent, the initial GTA VI trailer addresses at least two of these elements: Where and Who, with a small hint of When (leaving Why, What, and How for the time being).

The 91-second trailer unmistakably indicates that the game is set in contemporary times, especially evident through elements such as the featured social media app (resembling an in-game version of TikTok), the presence of bodycams on police officers, the modern appearance of cars, and the inclusion of twerking as a cultural reference. While it is presumed (yet unconfirmed) that the events in the game take place after those of GTA V, the connection to the characters or events from the previous game remains uncertain. The likelihood seems low, but without confirmation, it's speculative.

What is interesting (and confirmed) is that we will see a very different, modern and larger version of the 1980s Vice City we encountered back in 2002. This brings us neatly to the ‘where’. Going by what we were shown in the trailer, the art deco architecture, the alligators, the swamps, the airboat, the flamingoes and the beaches pretty much confirm that an expanded Miami (or as it is known in GTA parlance, Vice City) is going to be our venue for the next instalment. And that is extremely exciting, because quite honestly while I’ve had a blast with GTA V’s reimagination of California, I am eager for change.

And finally, there’s the ‘who’. While it was only on Tuesday that we were officially introduced to Lucia, word of her existence has been around since the 2022 developmental leaks that revealed work-in-progress footage of an apparently female protagonist. No doubt this raised the hackles of all manner of flotsam and jetsam floating on various fetid parts of the internet, who accused Rockstar of going too damn woke.

I’ll spare you the details; suffice it to say that Lucia was revealed in the trailer as an ex-con who reunites with her partner — husband, boyfriend or even sibling (it is the Deep South, after all) — and embarks on a whole lot of partying and heisting. The whole thing has a distinct ‘Bonnie and Clyde (if you’ll pardon the cliché) in the mid-2020s’ feel to it, which is definitely new for the series. This is where it gets really interesting because it is the first time in the 3D era that the series has a female protagonist.

It was in the second draft that I hastened to add the ‘3D era’ part because the top-down GTA and GTA 2 offered the player a selection of protagonists, including a few female options. That your choice didn’t really affect anything in the game is a different matter altogether. Still, Rockstar has cultivated a certain look and feel in its GTA titles (from GTA III onwards) that caters to a distinctly male gaze and outlook. The developer/publisher has a track record of pushing the envelope with its satirical and extremely tongue-in-cheek depictions of humankind in games (see: Bully, Manhunt and State of Emergency for instance), so we’re not going to get into the quagmire of right and wrong here.

However, beyond the (almost exclusively female) streetwalking prostitutes and strip clubs, it’s very clear that the lead characters of all those games were very clearly written as males. In other words, airdropping a woman into the role of Trevor Philips (GTA V) or Niko Bellic (GTA IV) would seem like a weird fit in the absence of substantial rewrites. The decision to have a female protagonist in GTA VI is a fantastic one because it sets up a new premise for which the writers will have to craft a compelling set of motives, temptations, ways to pass time, relationships, story arcs, gameplay loops maybe and so on. That, I think, is the part I’m most excited about.

Coming 2025

Considering most of Rockstar Games’ big launches take place in the third or fourth quarters of the year, it dawned on me at the conclusion of the trailer that there’s an awfully long time to go until this game sees the light of day. And so my mind began to wander: What if just as the trailer launch had to be pulled forward to account for leaks, the developer/publisher had its hand forced by the amount of leaks in the past 18 months to put out something about the game? A move to control the narrative, one might even say. Perhaps it was a decision taken at board-level by Take-Two Interactive, in view of its stock that had begun dropping in value on the NASDAQ since July this year. Lending credence to this theory is the fact that days after last month’s announcement that there would be a trailer dropping in December, the stock began to rise.

Now, what if it was none of the above, I began thinking as I discovered that the first trailer for GTA V was released on November 2, 2011. It was an iconic promo that reminded me of the Goodfellas opening with its brief soliloquy of “Why did I move here? I guess it was the weather”. Technically speaking, it was more in line with a post-Goodfellas vibe (Michael De Santa was revealed, after all, as a former gangster), but I digress. Still, the first GTA V trailer dropped nearly two years before the game did (September 17, 2013).

Placed alongside those dates, a December 2023 trailer for a 2025 release tracks perfectly. And much like the GTA V trailer gave us a glimpse of the sights and sounds of the city of San Andreas, its surroundings and one protagonist, the GTA VI one gives Vice City and Lucia a similar treatment. Graphically, it all looks fantastic and it’s unwise to put it past Rockstar to replicate that quality in-game. Plus, considering the Rockstar brand of quality that accompanies its new games (not necessarily remasters/ports, mind you), it’s equally unwise to bet against GTA VI setting new standards for what a video game can do… and make you do.

All in all, 2025 cannot come soon enough.