Last week Rockstar announced that it would be delaying Grand Theft Auto 6 until May 26 of 2026, over a year from now and approximately six months or so after its promised fall 2025 window. Now, in order to wash out the taste of that, Rockstar has released the second GTA 6 trailer, joining the first one that was released way back in December of 2023.
The trailer is far more heavily story-focused, mainly based around co-lead Jason and then midway through, switches to his steamy relationship with Lucia after she goes out of prison. That was a lot more sex and hooking up that I was expecting from this trailer, but hey, when in Vice City.
Trailer 2 is focused less on the random crazy happenings of Vice City like the first one, and dives deeper into story components of the game itself, along with showing how pretty it looks in-engine.
I immediately recognized the voice of Stephen Root as apparently some sort of low-level criminal boss, instructing Jason to shakedown local merchants. Later, we see Lucia and Jason escalate into full-scale masked robbery, though the overall plotline here remains at least somewhat of a mystery, despite all this new footage.
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Needless to say, this has broken the internet, as this time around, unlike the first trailer, Rockstar gave quite literally zero warning this was coming. YouTube viewcounts apparently cannot keep up with how many people are watching. I’m seeing 25,000 views with 928,000 likes, so something is very much broken here. The first one has 252 million views, and I would expect this much better trailer to get close to that, even perhaps beat it over time.
Grand Theft Auto 6 will be without question the biggest video game of all time, at least in terms of scope, though it will take time to beat GTA 5’s 210 million copies over a decade. That said, it will absolutely be setting day one/week one/month one sales records, based on the sheer level of hype this game has garnered.
The game being delayed isn’t ideal, as investors aren’t pleased. But publishers are breathing a sigh of relief they won’t have to compete with it in the fall, and players probably don’t care all that much about waiting a few more months when it’s been 12 years since GTA 5. And this looks, very clearly, absolutely incredible.
Update: Joining this trailer is also a high-level plot synopsis:
“Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive.”
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