Grand Theft Auto VI trailer: six hidden details about Rockstar's blockbuster new game

It’s here. Everybody be cool, but the reveal trailer for GTA 6 has dropped. It’s really real.

It’s also really far off. GTA 6 releases in 2025, which is enough time to watch the trailer 1.1 million times. That being the case, let the over-analysing commence!

You’re going to be told countless times in countless articles that you missed details in this trailer. And while it’s certainly irritating to have a web page make assessments about your capacity for deductive reasoning, Rockstar does have a history of loading its trailers with little touches that give an insight into the game world, story and characters.

So without any judgement about your own observational powers, here are the details that we’ve been mulling over since the GTA 6 trailer dropped.

That Tom Petty song

The trailer begins with establishing shots of some very Floridian roads, the barbed wire fence of a penitentiary, and then on one of GTA 6’s protagonists, Lucia. While you’re taking those in, you’re hearing the first few bars of Tom Petty’s Love is a Long Road, which plays for the duration of the trailer.

Rockstar didn’t just pop Spotify on shuffle and call it a job well done. This song’s telling us something.

Here’s the lyrics in the first chorus: ‘Yeah, we were desperate then to have each other to hold, but love is a long, long road.’

There’s been speculation that GTA 6 might feature a kind of Bonnie and Clyde love story between two playable protagonists, and this song selection really speaks to that idea. You’re watching a woman behind bars, then brief vignettes of her robbing convenience stores, while you’re listening to a song about troubled, toxic love.

It’s conveying nostalgia, too. We’re back in Vice City for the first time in over 20 years (unless you count 2006 PSP spin-off Vice City Stories) and three mainline GTA releases, and the last time Rockstar used this location it was basically a giant vessel for 80s pastiche. It was a city of pastel suits, copyright-friendly versions of Testarossas driving about, and soft rock radio.

So it’s significant that you’re hearing a soft rock song from 1989 as you’re looking at the return to this city in the modern day. This is Rockstar saying: yes the Eighties were fun, but look how far we’ve all come together.

The plane pulling a Nine1Nine banner

‘Why sixty nine when you can Nine1Nine’ reads the text on an aerial banner being pulled along by a plane above the city. It’s a good question, but it hardly blows the doors open on the plot of the game.

Some fans are wondering whether it’s a release date teaser (nine one nine - September 19th), but Rockstar doesn’t have priors of including assets in its trailers that don’t end up being part of the game world. In other words, we’ll probably see this plane and banner when the game’s out and we’re actually playing it. A flying release date that’s already passed would be quite a strange sight.

More likely, it’s a parody of the Miami club E11even. GTA games are nothing if not sarcastic reflections of modern reality, so it feels plausible that they’d take a shot at a real nightclub. Venues like this tend to feature prominently in GTA storylines too - who remembers the Malibu Club in the original 2002 Vice City? - so it makes sense that they’d focus some art and design time to promos for such a club.

The everglades

We see a handful of shots of wetlands, well outside the urban centre of Vice City itself. It’s establishing Vice City’s place in the wider world, but it’s also hinting that in the same way GTA 5 expanded Los Santos out into Vinewood Hills, the Senora Desert and Blaine County, we’ll likely get a big swathe of surrounding area around Vice City in GTA 6 too.

The exact nature and number of achievements for running over flamingoes in an airboat has yet to be uncovered.

The social media culture critique

A running theme throughout the trailer, you’ll notice, is people posing for social media content. You can see a chap on the beach filming his beloved partner shaking her rear. There’s a young lady twerking atop a roof at a car meet. There are clips of livestreams, complete with poop emoji-filled comments.

Commentary on social media’s impact was a big part of GTA 5. You snuck into the LifeInvader offices and masqueraded as a tech support guy. You assassinated a social media mogul live on air during his keynote speech. Look, we’re not saying it isn’t on the nose, we’re just saying Rockstar like to parody social media culture. That culture’s evolved vastly in the decade since GTA 5 released, so expect more rumination on the topic from Rockstar in GTA 6.

The customised vehicles

Tuner culture’s big down in the sunshine state, and you can see that reflected - literally, at times - in the modded cars that crop up in GTA 6’s reveal trailer. Lowriders with chrome finishes. Widebody kits and mirror wraps. Spinners. It’s like Xzibit himself was given free reign on the traffic of Vice City. We wouldn’t be surprised to find a fish tank in every third car.

There’s a reason these vehicles show up in the trailer. They’re telling us something about Vice City’s culture, deepening the sense of place, but there’s a good chance they’re also showcasing the vehicle customisation that the player can get stuck into. A trip down to Vice City Customs should offer some serious options in this game.

The story

This is the first time we’ve been introduced to one of GTA 6’s protagonists, Lucia. Her prison officer asks what she thinks landed her here in the clink. Lucia says it was bad luck.

It’s possible that Lucia has been wrongfully convicted, but given that we see her robbing a convenience store and making a getaway in the back of a car holding a wad of cash, that seems unlikely. Therefore, that dialogue line tells you something crucial about the character: her moral code.

She’s committed crimes, but she doesn’t see anything wrong with that. It wasn’t her actions that landed her in jail, but the misfortune of being caught. Very GTA.

During the convenience store robbery, we see a masked man behind Lucia, implying that he’s an accomplice. Are we looking at GTA 6’s other playable character in this shot? Rockstar’s certain to spill a bit more in this regard before 2025.