GTA 6 Trailer 1 Frame-by-Frame: Every Confirmed Location
Trailer 1, released December 4, 2023, is 91 seconds long. It racked up roughly 93 million views in its first 24 hours, breaking the record for fastest non-music video to hit 100 million on YouTube. Here's what we actually saw.
The soundtrack
Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" plays over the entire trailer. Rockstar has a long history of using needle-drop tracks in trailers that don't appear in the actual game soundtrack, so don't read this as a confirmed in-game song.
What the trailer confirmed
- Setting: The state of Leonida, a fictionalized version of Florida. The on-screen text confirms "Leonida" by name.
- Vice City returns: Multiple shots of an updated Vice City skyline, beaches, and neon-lit streets.
- Two protagonists: A woman named Lucia (in prison at the start of the trailer) and a male partner referred to in marketing as Jason.
- Wildlife: Alligators in residential pools, flamingos, deer, and a monkey riding on a car dashboard.
- Biomes: Urban Vice City, beach communities, swamp/Everglades-style wetlands, suburban strip malls, and rural trailer parks.
- Time of day: Heavy emphasis on golden-hour and neon-night lighting — the "Vice" aesthetic is fully back.
The internet-meme moments
- "Florida Joker" — a man in green hair shouting on the highway.
- "Hawk Tuah Girl" energy — beach-front dance scenes that immediately became reaction GIFs.
- The alligator-in-the-Wawa bit, which is a real Florida news story almost shot-for-shot.
Rockstar's art direction is leaning hard into "Florida Man" internet culture as a satirical lens. This is consistent with how GTA V handled California stereotypes.
What was NOT confirmed
- Online multiplayer mode (though it's effectively guaranteed given GTA Online's revenue).
- Single-player DLC.
- Map size relative to GTA V.
- Character switching mechanics like GTA V's three-protagonist system.
What to watch for in Trailer 2
Rockstar's pattern with GTA V was: announce, trailer 1, then trailers 2 and 3 in the months leading up to launch, each focused on a specific protagonist. Expect Trailer 2 to feature Jason's storyline more heavily, and a third trailer focused on online or activities.
Sources: Rockstar Games official trailer (December 4, 2023), Rockstar Games newswire post announcing Grand Theft Auto VI.