The first trailer for the Grand Theft Auto VI has been officially released a day early, after it leaked online.
The trailer was originally set to launch at 2pm GMT on Tuesday, but after a low-quality version of the 90-second teaser started circulating on social media, developer Rockstar Games decided to drop the real thing on Monday evening.
“Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube,” Rockstar posted on X, formerly Twitter.
The clip confirms two of the biggest rumours about the game – it will return to the fictional, Miami-inspired Vice City, and will have a female protagonist for the first time in the franchise’s history.
Here’s everything else we know.
When will GTA 6 come out?
At the end of the trailer, Rockstar revealed the game will be coming out in 2025 – but that’s as much as we know.
It had previously been theorised online that the game would be released between April 2024 and March 2025, based on information from a recent investors call at Take-Two Interactive – the company that owns Rockstar.
As PCGames reports, its chief financial officer said during the call: “We are positioning our business for a significant inflection point in fiscal 2025 that will culminate in us delivering new record levels of operating performance next year and beyond.”
If this remains the plan, the game could be released in the first quarter of 2025, but this is currently nothing more than speculation, and it is very common for large projects like this to be delayed.
GTA VI will be the first mainline GTA game since GTA V way back in 2013 – the second-best-selling video game of all time with more than 185 million copies sold.
Which consoles will it be available on?
This is perhaps the biggest unanswered question about the game. We know it will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, but nothing else has been confirmed outside of this.
If it follows the pattern of previous GTA games a PC release is likely. GTA IV and V both came out on PC several months after they launched on console.
Given the size of the game, it appears unlikely older generations consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will be able to support it. For similar reasons a Nintendo Switch release appears unlikely.
What do we know about the game itself?
The biggest reveal is that the game will indeed feature a female lead, and we know her name is Lucia. There is also a male protagonist, with whom she appears to be in a relationship, but his name is currently unknown. We are also yet to discover who is voicing the characters.
The game returns to Vice City for the first time since 2002, and does not appear to have deviated far from the formula that made that game – and all others in the franchise – so incredibly popular. That means shootouts, car chases, armed robberies… you know the drill.
The trailer begins with a view of the Vice City skyline in the typically pink and orange hues of a Florida sunset, before jumping to a prison where Lucia is an inmate. She is asked by a staff member, “Do you know why you’re here?”, to which she replies: “Bad luck I guess.”
Immediately notable from this clip are the games graphics, with individual strands of hair moving with incredible authenticity.
We then dive right into city life, backed by Tom Petty’s “Love is a Long Road”. We see a speedboat rocketing through a swap, flamingos taking to the sky and a packed-out beach, before visiting the clubs and strip joints ever-present in GTA games.
The trailer also features a number of TikTok-style clips illustrating a city that appears to have descended into large-scale debauchery and unruliness, complete with an alligator strolling into a convenience store.
“The only way we’re going to get through this,” Lucia says to her partner after a clip of them robbing a store, “is by sticking together. Being a team. Trust?”
“Trust,” he replies, before the game’s logo and 2025 release date is revealed.
The trailer already has more than 60 million views on YouTube as of 12 noon on Tuesday, showing the voracious appetite for a game that is a decade in the making.