Grand Theft Auto VI and the Best Joke of All

The first I saw of the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI was through bleary eyes, in bed, early in the morning. It was a series of screenshots on Twitter – or X, as we must all now learn to call it – and none of them looked right. They had the dreary-smeary look of A.I. renderings, at once sharp and imprecise, like something remembered or dreamt. The person posting them began, “GTA VI Leaked,” and then, sure enough, “I fixed the graphics with AI.” I saw two or three of these images, wrinkled my nose, and went back to sleep.

Strange to tell, after at least twenty viewings of the real deal, there remains something perfect about that first glimpse: half-obscured, trammelled by dumb commentary, crunched and filtered through a phone. This is, after all, the essence of Rockstar’s vision: a public whose media munches hungrily on itself, distorts the world, and stagnates the flow of our days into marshlands of lost time. Also, the trailer had very pretty skies. The opening shot, of a highway at dusk, was so pink and dazed that the camera appeared to have been dunked into a Cosmopolitan. Much of what was shown off was spliced with clips of in-game news broadcasts – reports on biker gangs, car wrecks, alligators plodding eagerly into shops. These were cut with flashes of a social media platform, styled after TikTok, and our view of Vice City, wherein the game unfolds, goes portrait. The edges of the frame blur like frosted glass.

Before the trailer was released (it was leaked, in the small hours, prompting Rockstar to uncork it ahead of schedule), people were wondering about the potency of a new Grand Theft Auto. How could it possibly take aim and skewer a society that has, since the last game, in 2013, curdled and soured into self-parody? The answer? It doesn’t have to. The state of Leonida, in which Grand Theft Auto VI is set, is modelled on Florida: the sunshine state, the state of Donald Trump, of Mar-a-Lago, the state of the retired, the golf-addled, the tax-free. The state of America.

The new game (it won’t be out until 2025, barring any delays) will centre on Lucia, who commits robberies with her beau. It’s Rockstar does Bonnie and Clyde! Or, more likely, Rockstar does Mickey and Mallory, the star couple of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. At any rate, it’s good to see a Grand Theft Auto protagonist in an orange jumpsuit. This is how we first see Lucia, in prison, and it harks nicely back to the hero of Grand Theft Auto III, Claude, who began in the same dress, having been freshly squeezed by the law. It’s a great way to start a game whose calling card is absolute freedom: lock ’em up then spring ’em loose! Hence the name of the first mission in that game, “Give Me Liberty.” Its hero was also snarled up in a poisonous romance – Bonnie and Claude! – robbing banks with his girlfriend until she betrayed him, shot him, and left him for dead.

After meeting Lucia, we then get a montage of madness. Radioactively green cars screeching in rubbery circles at an intersection, like a nocturnal dance. Revellers at a race track, spattered with mud. Yacht parties. Rooftop parties. Police raids. Road rage. A woman in a nightgown wielding a pair of hammers. Billboards advertising a drug called Angstipan (“It Cures Emotions!”). This is societal crack-up done the Rockstar way. Not the CD Projekt RED way, encrusted with chrome and holograms; not the Ubisoft way, surgically shorn of political intent, padded with woolly fiction; and not the Bethesda way, where the cracking was done long ago, and the run-off is rich with warm humour. This is us, tweaked and heightened just enough, but recognisably us. Against all that, we have a couple of lovers who rob a grocery store. It almost seems quaint, sincere – as though it belongs to another century entirely.

Toward the end of the trailer, we hear Lucia say, “The only way we’re gonna get through this is by sticking together, being a team.” You wonder if, by “this,” she means their immediate situation, their continuing misadventures, their being harried by the police, or simply . . . life. It’s a first for Rockstar, whose spiked view of the world has always veiled a faintly conservative urge. Playing Grand Theft Auto is sometimes like reading Bret Easton Ellis; you sense, behind the blunt depiction of amoral acts, a finger refusing to wag but daring yours to. I staggered away from the drugged and ruined kids of Less Than Zero thinking, Look where all that freedom gets you! I had the same feeling after watching the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar has positioned its brand of deviance as a reasonable answer to a world beyond pastiche.

The most tender moment comes as the pair lie on a motel bed. “Trust?,” she says, and back comes the answer: “Trust.” Of all the commodities in this series, trust is surely the rarest and most unstable, not to say painfully unfashionable. Just ask Claude. There is so much in this trailer to think about. The powder-white coasts. The swamplands. The graphics. The physics that govern the flick of a woman’s hair. The vehicles. The music. In between it all, though, is a great joke. Rockstar has positioned the lead characters of a Grand Theft Auto game as the most grounded folks around. How’s that for satire?