Grand Theft Auto 6's First Trailer, A Year Later

Grand Theft Auto 6's first trailer arrived a year ago this month on December 4 following a leak. Like hyenas scavenging a dead elephant, in the days and weeks that followed fans picked it apart for every possible detail.

Now, after a year, and with no new trailer from Rockstar, we look back at the last 12 months since the world got its first (official) look at what will likely be one of the biggest games of the decade when it releases in the fall of 2025.

On December 1, 2023, Rockstar Games ended a decade of anticipation and officially announced the date for when to expect the first GTA 6 trailer.

To announce the trailer’s release date, Rockstar Games shared an image that contained some birds. As expected, GTA fans latched onto the birds and started crafting theories, some silly and some serious. At one point, 50,000+ fans were waiting for the trailer to go live, basically watching a blank screen and hoping to see GTA 6 first. That didn’t happen...

The plan was for GTA 6's trailer to launch on December 5, 2023. But it leaked on the evening of December 4. In response, Rockstar released the trailer early. This wasn’t the first time that Grand Theft Auto 6 had leaked.

In September 2022, a massive hack saw footage of GTA 6 leak online, giving players a look at the in-development game well ahead of 2023's trailer and confirming rumors that Vice City would be the setting (or at least a setting) for the sequel. 2023's trailer further confirmed this.

At the 1:05 mark in GTA 6's debut trailer, you can briefly spot a heavily tattooed man speaking to a judge via a webcam sentencing. This character seems to be based on a real-life Florida man who went viral in 2017 due to his looks and was dubbed the “Florida Joker.”

On December 5, 2023, Lawrence Sullivan—the Florida Joker himself—posted a video to TikTok in which he claimed Rockstar based the character on him and that they needed to “talk” to Sullivan. Then on December 11, Sullivan demanded Rockstar Games and its parent company Take-Two Interactive pay him $2 million.

“We gotta talk or [if] not you gotta give me like a mil or two,” Sullivan said. “Florida Joker ain’t having that, y’all took my likeness, y’all took my life.”

On December 13 2023, Sullivan claimed he was going to sue Rockstar over the whole situation. However, in March, he backed down and instead asked for a few hundred thousand to voice the character in-game. Rockstar has seemingly never responded to Sullivan’s threats or demands.

On December 5, 2024—a year after the trailer dropped—Sullivan uploaded a video on TikTok claiming his threats of a lawsuit were just him trolling. He then claimed that he was the reason the GTA 6 trailer was so popular. This saga continues.

While Rockstar’s biggest fans can sometimes be toxic, they can also channel their excitement and dedication into cool shit, too. For example, a bunch of different people have spent the past year remaking the GTA 6 trailer in different mediums and forms.

One person even flew to Miami to recreate it in real life as closely as possible. Regardless of how the game turns out or when it releases, this trailer is burned into my brain thanks in large part to all the remakes of it I’ve seen over the last 12 months.

And so, here we are. A year has passed since Rockstar finally provided the world with its first look at GTA 6. Now, fans are so desperate for the next trailer that they are looking everywhere for clues about when it might arrive.

A popular theory involved the phases of the moon as seen in an advertisement for a new GTA Online update and indicated that a new trailer might arrive on November 22. That theory, like all of them, was wrong, and fans are still waiting.

Will we have to wait until 2025 for the second trailer? At this point, that seems likely to be the case. But Rockstar is unpredictable, so who knows? Perhaps on December 31, an hour before midnight, the publisher will drop the second trailer and break the internet once again.