It’s just one trailer. Let’s get that bit out of the way first. It’s a single trailer, 90 seconds long – or really, about 77 seconds of actual footage – and of all the world’s video game developers now, none are granted more benefit of the doubt, more pre-loaded, automatically qualified hype, than Rockstar. Nobody needs a breathless reaction to one trailer less. As other studios scrambled to meme Rockstar’s announcement-of-an-announcement post the other day, dipping their own reveals and posts in neon pink and orange, Christian Donlan described it as like being in Jurassic Park. A herd of already majestic Brachiosaurus and Gallimimus quietly minding their business in a field – and suddenly: T-Rex. A whole ecosystem scatters.
Its arrival – especially its nice and early one, like a dinner guest before you’ve done the Hoovering – means we’ve had to scatter in our own way too. We’ve run through what it suggests will feature in GTA 6 already, and the magic thread it points to at the heart of its story, and gathered everything we could possibly know about GTA 6 and put it in one place as a guide. But what struck me about it is less what it says about what might be in the next Grand Theft Auto, than what it says about Rockstar – and what Rockstar thinks of Grand Theft Auto itself.
Watch this thing through and watch it closely, and the whole of Rockstar’s lineage starts to reveal itself. This studio has been infatuated, obsessed, with cinema since the beginning of its modern era, which you might pin somewhere around the end of GTA 3, and the arrival of Ray Liotta-voiced, hawaiian shirt-clad Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City. But in its years of growth since – and it has grown, much as many would justifiably argue GTA is known for its puerility – Rockstar also discovered something else. In San Andreas, with CJ, it took its first steps from viewing cinema as cool shots and camera movements and references to things actual films have done before, and discovered character.
