Tuesday was the scheduled day for the reveal of Grand Theft Auto VI, but someone got their hands on the trailer early. Not long after the leak showed up online, developer Rockstar Games pulled the trigger and the official trailer went live Monday evening.
Only a game like the return of Grand Theft Auto could invite such anticipation for a mere 1 minute and 30 second trailer of a game that won’t come out until 2025. Rockstar confirmed last month it was dropping its trailer for its hotly-anticipated follow-up to Grand Theft Auto 5.
Rockstar offered us a few scant details about the game’s world and story. The new game takes place in the fictional state of Leonida, obviously a stand-in for Florida. With that, there’s a whole lot of swampland for players to navigate and ‘gaters falling into suburban pools and strutting into convenience stores. There’s also the Miami stand-in, Vice City, that’s moved on since the 1980s and Tommy Vercetti’s mob rampage.
The company stressed in a release how this was an “immersive evolution” of the GTA series, but we still don’t have details about gameplay or what seems to be the game’s two main characters. GTA 6 will be available on the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with no confirmation that a PC version will be included at launch.
Despite the two-year wait time and few details present in the trailer, the anticipation for the new game is ratcheting up. The trailer already has gained nearly 75.9 million views on YouTube as of midday Tuesday ET.
Last year, players had a small taste of what was an early, early build of GTA 6 when a hacker breached Rockstar’s servers and released some footage of the game in pre-alpha development. That gameplay footage included players being able to enter a strip club and rob a small restaurant. Other than that, players have had very little to go on save for the hints of a return to the hazy neon of Vice City through a few promotional images featuring that purple color palette and plenty of palm trees.
It’s been 10 years since GTA V hit the shelves, back during the seventh console generation. Despite the years, the game became the third-best-selling game of all time behind Minecraft and Tetris. Despite its strong sales, the game’s multiplayer component GTA Online proved so popular it was spun out into its own downloadable title filled to the brim with purchasable content. Take-Two Interactive told investors earlier this year that GTA V and GTA Online together netted the company nearly $8 billion in revenue over the past decade. With that, you can put a big bet on Rockstar trying to recreate that online success with the next GTA sequel.