Grand Theft Auto 6’s first trailer this week is just 90 seconds long, but analyzing its hidden details and Easter eggs already seems to be a full-time job for some fans.
The trailer has racked up over 142 million views in just a week, and already thousands of posts are dissecting it for brief glimpses of things others have missed. Here are a few of our favorites that you may not have seen yet.
South Beach is hopping in Vice City
The trailer made it clear that GTA 6 is making a serious effort to avoid the relative emptiness of GTA’s earlier cities. Every shot, whether beach or boulevard or even the open ocean, is packed with vehicles, people, animals and items.
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Take this shot based on Ocean Drive in South Beach, which shows a density of cars, pedestrians and other interactable features. If you zoom in on the panhandler sitting next to the road, you’ll see an iguana on his shoulder.
There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Lance Vance’s sartorial style—we assume it’s not really him, since he died in GTA: Vice City. But on the sidewalk on the left side, there’s a figure in shadow with his build sporting his signature white suit and purple shirt.
The cops have stepped up their fleets
Police forces in previous GTA games have occasionally shown off a new sedan in a cutscene or trailer, but in-game, it’s pretty much the same model selected for that game, all the time. (The original GTA: Vice City had the Portsmouth cruisers based on the Plymouth Reliant, for example.)
In contrast, the GTA 6 trailer has half a dozen different models, old and new, with lifelike badging based on Miami-area municipalities. The fact that at least some of those scenes appear to be rendered in-game makes us think that as you rack up wanted stars, you’re going to see a lot more variety screaming up behind you. And more police models on your tail also means more you can steal… and they’re always the best cars in the game.
Does that car have a usable trunk?
Folks have been oohing and aahing on Reddit about the detailed cars in the trailer, pointing out the duct tape that’s holding on the interior handle on a car with its door open as an example. One interesting detail is a car’s popped rear hatch in one scene. In earlier leaked gameplay, the implication was that GTA’s car storage might be used for heists and the like. Is this a nod toward the ability to store items—clothing, weapons, and so on—as you can on your horse in Red Dead Redemption 2?
The ads throughout the trailer for vinyl companies, and the sight of a car with a raised suspension in a locale based on the real-life Wynwood art district, has made folks speculate that more-detailed car customization might be a thing this time around, as well.
Zoom in anywhere, see something new
One of the things that makes the scenes in the trailer look so realistic is the absolutely packed amount of detail on nearly every surface—and there are a lot of surfaces. Intricate textures everywhere are the name of the game in the GTA 6 trailer:
- Tank tops with those vertical cloth lines when you zoom in
- Paintings with detailed brush-stroke and canvas textures
- Chip bags with lifelike wrinkles
- The loops and dips in power and data cables as they connect to the poles (which have random stickers, and birds that perch on them)
- Correctly styled street lights and freeway signs for South Florida
- Sand on the feet of the people at the beach
- Moss hanging from the barbed wire at the prison
- The cat’s eye road reflectors reflect light in night scenes
- Liquor bottles on shelves with liquor in them
- Real reflections in car side view mirrors
It’s all a little nuts. Apparently the Rockstar artists have, in fact, been working on the game over the past decade.
There’s a lot happening down in the Keys
Developers wanted to include their own version of the Florida Keys in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as “Gator Keys,” but it was cut. This time the trailer clearly shows the Keys and the distinctive Rickenbacker Causeway bridge leading to them, and there’s a lot going on in that shot.
Zoom in and you’ll see dolphins in the water, tons of small boats and yachts here and in other ocean locations, some pretty incredible potential stunt jump locations on the old bridge/fishing pier alongside it with its breaks in the road, and is that a blimp in the top of the frame? (Please let it be a blimp—I was a total fan of the controllable Atomic Blimp over Los Santos in GTA 5, and blimps were added to GTA Online a few years back, too.)
Other airborne fun in the ad includes the banner-towing planes over Vice City’s version of South Beach—the club announcement you can see in the trailer (“Nine1Nine: Why Sixty Nine When You Can Nine 1 Nine”) is a reference to the popular, real South Beach hangout E11even, which employs similar plane-hauled advertising in real life.
Is that proper water physics we spy?
Several shots in the trailer show what appears to be new physics for interaction with water. Check out the flamingos taking off at :21, or the speedboats at :23, or the monster truck plowing through muddy water in a single frame at :50 and again at :56. That’s water actually being displaced by moving objects, which is a level of sophistication we haven’t seen in a GTA before.
That also implies that we’re going to spend more time in the water, and seeing so many interactable-looking boats, yachts, water animals (check out that throwback shark!) and beachfront, I can’t wait.
Tom Petty songs and GTA go way back
Florida native Tom Petty’s “Love is a Long Road” is the soundtrack of the GTA 6 trailer, a surprising choice for a contemporary-set game. Petty released “Love is a Long Road” in 1989 as part of his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. He died in 2017 from an accidental overdose of pain medication after fracturing his hip.
This isn’t the first time Petty’s had a song in a GTA, though: The artist loved having “Runnin’ Down a Dream”—arguably the best driving song ever made—in GTA: San Andreas, his estate said in a statement.
“Long Road” is a nod to the relationship of the pair in the trailer, perhaps winks at the 10 years of development time (not over yet!) on GTA 6, and shows its strength as a hit in its own right. Though it was only the B side to “Free Fallin’,” Petty’s biggest hit ever, “Long Road” surged 8,000 percent in streaming popularity after the GTA trailer hit, Billboard wrote. It also saw a 37,000 percent increase in Spotify streams, according to the New York Times, and was searched a quarter-million times on Shazam within 24 hours. It soared to #2 on the Apple iTunes list, just after Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Petty said when he wrote the song, one of the last on the album, that he was inspired by the sound of shifting gears on a motorcycle when creating the distinctive chords. It’s going to be perfect for long drives on those Vice City highways. When the couple in the trailer kick in the doors to the convenience store, there is a “Petty Forever” bumper sticker on the glass, in the exact colors of the Full Moon Fever cover.
The trailer’s fake social media posts are based on real-life Florida Men (and Women)
We’ve written about this separately, but nearly every scene-setting shot delivered via satirical social media in the GTA 6 trailer is an homage to real-life social media trenders in Miami. That woman twerking on the roof of the car, the double-hammer-wielding housewife, the Joker-esque tattoo guy, endless references to gators invading businesses and home pools—all exist in the real world.
In short, the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer packs a ridiculous amount of detail into 90 seconds. The bad news is that we’ll have to wait until at least 2025 to play it ourselves—and probably longer for the PC version.