Rockstar published the second Grand Theft Auto VI trailer on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at roughly 9:30 a.m. Eastern, with no announcement, no countdown and no teaser. Four days earlier the company had delayed the game to May 2026, so the timing read as an apology.
It ran 2 minutes 46 seconds. Within four hours it had 19 million views, 312,000 comments and 3 million likes, and had displaced the Met Gala livestream at the top of YouTube trending. Across all platforms it reached 475 million views in 24 hours — Take-Two called it the biggest video launch in history, ahead of the trailers for Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
All forty scenes are laid out on the map of Florida: see where each one was shot on the Trailer 2 route, where the video and the map run together.
Everything below is captured from that video and from the 70 official screenshots Rockstar published the same day. Claims are marked as confirmed or as community interpretation, because a large amount of what gets repeated about this trailer is the latter presented as the former.
One technical note that matters for everything that follows: Rockstar states the trailer was captured entirely in-engine on PlayStation 5, cutscenes and gameplay footage alike. It also posted an uncompressed 63 Mbps version on its own site, which is why frame-by-frame analysis of this trailer produced so much more than the first one.
The opening: Leonida Keys
Leonida Keys, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
An aerial pass over a small coastal town — boats, gulls, low buildings — settling on a green house with a man working on the roof.
The man is Jason Duval. He is interrupted by Brian Heder demanding his checks. Jason gets in a car and leaves.
The stilt house: a man on the roof, a blue Vapid pickup by the porch, the fin of a classic sedan in the foreground. A satellite dish and a basketball hoop on the wall. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Two things in this thirty seconds set up the rest.
Jason’s line about fixing some leaks is, per widespread community reading, Rockstar making a joke at its own expense about the years of GTA VI material that has escaped the studio. Nobody at Rockstar has confirmed the pun is deliberate. It is also difficult to believe it is not.
Confirmed: Brian Heder is a classic Keys-era smuggler who still moves product through his boatyard with his third wife Lori. Jason lives in his house. Both facts come from Rockstar’s own character biographies, published the same day.
Community: Jason’s tattoo has been read as marking service in an airborne unit. Rockstar’s bio says only that he did a stint in the army.
Jason by the wall of that same house: cap turned backwards, mirrored shades, the tattoo on his shoulder. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Brian Heder, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Collecting the checks
A neighbour calls out as Jason drives past. Hard cut: Jason hits a store clerk and empties the register.
GameSpot’s reading is direct — getting Brian his checks means shaking down local businesses, and the trailer shows you what the job actually is before it shows you anything glamorous.
Road signs during the drive name four destinations: Ambrosia, Downtown, VCI Airport, Southside. That is a lot of map geography delivered in a shot most viewers will not pause on.
The interchange: 95 North to VCI Airport and Ambrosia, 97 North to Port VC and Downtown, the SW 9th Ave exit to Southside and Peacock Bay. A plane comes in to land above the road. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Vice City itself
Vice City, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The Miami New Times ran the trailer past people who live there, which produced the most specific location identifications available.
Jason lifting weights on the beach is Lummus Park in South Beach. A night pool scene matches the Clevelander, alongside a fictional hotel named the Dominion. The mural reading Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité places a scene in a Little Haiti analogue, with an elevated train visible behind it — a stand-in for Metrorail. The local football team has been renamed the Miami Manatees.
Signage and text visible across the trailer: Sinfrontera National Bank on screens during the robbery. A bar sign reading Hurricane Roxy. A nightclub called NINE 1 NINE, which Dexerto identifies as a direct play on the real Miami club E11EVEN. Phil’s Ammu-Nation, advertised by a moustached man with a mullet promising more guns than the law allows.
Community: licence plates from three states appear — Leonida, Gloriana (a Georgia parody) and Liberty City. GTABase spotted the Gloriana plate first.
The street through a windshield: wall-to-wall murals, a HAITI sign, police cars at the kerb and an elevated highway behind them. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Lucia leaves prison
Lucia Caminos, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Jason asks for her at Leonida Penitentiary. She walks out. The Rockstar Games Presents card lands.
Lucia walks out in sweatpants and slides. In the foreground, Jason in a Let Freedom shirt with an eagle and rifles. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Confirmed on screen: Lucia is wearing an ankle monitor when she walks out.
Community: Dexerto reported that the monitor disappears from later shots, and read that as the game restricting where you can go early on — a story-driven boundary instead of an invisible wall. On the Rockstar Games Presents card, which comes later in the trailer, the monitor is still on Lucia’s ankle.
The Rockstar Games Presents card. The monitor is on her ankle here too, well after she leaves the prison. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The question stays open: an ankle monitor is a natural way to justify a restricted map area at the start of a story, and Rockstar put one on a protagonist. Whether the game does anything with it is not something this trailer tells us.
Confirmed: Rockstar’s bio says Lucia’s father taught her to fight, that she went inside protecting her family, and that she got out on luck. It also says she wants the life her mother dreamed about back in Liberty City, which is the trailer’s one explicit link to the wider series geography.
The bank robbery
Lucia in a skull mask and shades holds a teller at gunpoint. Jason, in a matching mask, walks a second employee away. Sinfrontera National Bank is on the screens behind them.
Lucia in a skull mask and shades raises a submachine gun. The room is flooded with red alarm light, marble and railings behind her. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Community, well supported: Raul Bautista is described by Rockstar as a veteran bank robber constantly recruiting people willing to take maximum risk. Connecting him to this scene is an inference, but a short one.
Raul Bautista, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The quiet middle
Domestic scenes, beer, conversations on a pier. This is where the trailer does its character work, and where the analysis crowd found most of its material.
Den of Geek and Dexerto both tracked the same progression: the apartment gets visibly more expensive across the trailer, the clothes get better, and Jason’s tan, hair and build change. The inference is property customisation, clothing systems and some form of RPG body progression. The beach weights shot fed a specific theory that the San Andreas gym mechanic is returning — Dexerto finds it plausible, Den of Geek calls it a stretch.
Confirmed by Rockstar, not the trailer: character customisation covering clothing, accessories, hair, Jason’s beard, Lucia’s makeup and nails, and tattoos. That came from the pre-order materials in June 2026, over a year later.
The detail people quote most from this section is the smallest: the bubbles rise in the beer.
Cal in the bar
Cal Hampton, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
A new character orders shots. The bartender rings a bell under a sign reading Hurricane Roxy.
The bar from inside: Happy Hour neon over the counter, the HURRICANE ROXY sign on the right, rows of bottles and glasses, drinkers at the service window. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
His name is Cal Hampton — Rockstar’s site confirms it. GameSpot’s breakdown calls him Cal Tompkins, which is an error worth knowing about, because it has been copied elsewhere. Rockstar’s bio: Jason’s friend and fellow Brian Heder errand-runner, who stays home listening to coast guard radio with a beer and some private browser tabs, wondering what if everything on the internet is true.
The sign over the counter reads Hurricane Roxy, and Roxy is already a name in this game: she is one half of the rap duo Real Dimez, the other half being Bae-Luxe. Rockstar published both bios the day the trailer landed.
Community: whether the bar is named after her or after an actual hurricane, nobody knows. GameSpot raised both readings and committed to neither.
Bae-Luxe in the studio: a BL pendant on the chain, the mixing desk and monitors to her right. The official duo poster gives her the same pendant and Roxy a name chain. Official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The crime montage
Drive-by shooting. Lucia in an MMA cage. A truck dragging a safe through the streets. Police cars destroyed with a rocket launcher. Parties, club selfies, strip club dancers.
The safe scene was matched to Fast Five within hours of the trailer landing.
A night street under the lamps: a pickup with its brake lights on drags a load behind it, sparks flying. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Two people Rockstar named on the same day sit behind this section: Boobie Ike, who turned a street reputation into a strip club, property and a recording studio, and Dre’Quan Priest, a dealer whose actual ambition was always music.
Boobie Ike, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Dre’Quan Priest, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Phil’s Ammu-Nation, and the theory that got out of hand
Official weapon imagery. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The advert features a man who looks and sounds like Phil Cassidy from Vice City and GTA III — with both arms. Phil lost one in Vice City in 2002.
The community explanations, in ascending order of ambition: it is his son; it is his grandson; Rockstar is quietly resetting its own continuity.
Then IGN highlighted the theory that ate the discussion — that previous Grand Theft Auto games exist inside GTA VI’s world as films, which is why Phil turns up on a television screen in Jason’s house. It is unfalsifiable and completely unsupported, and it is the most entertaining idea the trailer produced.
Community: Dexerto also spotted a PlayStation 5 sitting next to that television.
The Phil’s Ammu-Nation ad on screen: a moustached man in a store tank top holding a rifle, gun racks behind him. A DualSense controller and two beers on the table, a white console with a blue light strip under the TV. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The Red Dead money
The best-sourced easter egg here was found by a Reddit user, u/cph2001, in r/GTA6, and picked up by Dexerto, IGN and RockstarINTEL. The close-up of the bills that made it readable is in the first trailer; in the second one, money only turns up in the store register.
The presidents on the in-game banknotes are Thaddeus Waxman on the ten and President Hardin on the one. Both appear in Red Dead Redemption 2 — on cigarette cards and portraits. Hardin had already turned up on a hundred-dollar bill in GTA Online’s The Contract update.
Money in the second trailer: the open register drawer from the store scene, Jason’s hand above the tray. The clerk lies behind the counter; a lighter and a pack marked 420 sit on the till. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Community, and where it goes off the rails: part of the fanbase reads this as proof the two series share a universe, and a subset went further and proposed that Jason is a descendant of Arthur Morgan. IGN reported the theory without endorsing it. Dexerto’s counter is the sensible one — Red Dead refers to real US states constantly, so a shared banknote is an easter egg, not a cosmology.
A weaker claim also circulates: a stencil resembling Everett Morgan’s wanted poster from RDR2, said to appear around the 1:17 mark. No major outlet has verified it.
The story theories
All community, none confirmed.
Jason is an undercover cop
Two supports: Jason tells a prison guard he might have been there before, and an older officer later says that cops have to protect each other — immediately before a cut to Jason shooting. IGN treats this as the most plausible of the theories in circulation.
A third playable character
An extension of the above: the older officer might be a third protagonist, hunting Jason and Lucia.
One of them betrays the other
IGN’s summary is that most of the fanbase expects it. Variants include one or both dying, and a multiple-endings system.
Lucia’s brother is in the trailer
Reddit user u/sidewinda98 noticed the same curly-haired man appears twice — in the bar being embraced by an older woman, and in a nightclub selfie. The thread’s reading is brother and mother. A competing reading in the same thread is that the woman is too young to be a parent and may be pregnant.
Straight from cutscene into gameplay
In the scene where Jason enters a house, the camera slides into an over-the-shoulder view. The theory is that this is how the game opens, possibly twice — once per protagonist — to introduce both before a time skip.
The regions the montage covers
The trailer moves across all six confirmed regions, and Rockstar updated its site the same day to name them. Every one of the 40 official frames is explained in the locations guide.
Port Gellhorn, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Port Gellhorn is Leonida’s forgotten coast — cheap motels, abandoned attractions, empty malls — with Panama City, Florida named as the model.
Grassrivers, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Grassrivers is the Everglades. Ambrosia is central Florida industry, built around the Allied Crystal sugar plant.
Mount Kalaga National Park, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Mount Kalaga draws on north Florida and Providence Canyon in Georgia. Dexerto spotted a puma in it. Den of Geek catalogued fish, alligators, birds, deer and a shop cat elsewhere in the trailer.
Confirmed side activities visible on screen: organised fighting, fishing, pool, mini golf, the gym. A working metro or elevated rail system appears in at least two shots.
The song
Hot Together by The Pointer Sisters, written by Sharon Robinson, released in 1986.
GameSpot’s reading of the choice: it is a song about a couple with an intense physical and emotional connection, which maps onto how Rockstar is presenting Jason and Lucia — and it rhymes structurally with Trailer 1, which used Tom Petty’s Love Is A Long Road.
Spotify streams of the track rose by 182,000 percent within two hours of the trailer going live.
Other music identified in the trailer and its accompanying material: Everybody Have Fun Tonight by Wang Chung, Child Support by Zenglen, and Talkin’ to Myself Again by Tammy Wynette. Den of Geek’s inference from the Wynette track is that a country station is returning for the first time since San Andreas.
How it compares to Trailer 1
| Trailer 1, Dec 2023 | Trailer 2, May 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime | ~1:31 | 2:46 |
| Music | Love Is A Long Road, Tom Petty | Hot Together, The Pointer Sisters |
| Purpose | Setting and mood, introducing Lucia | Narrative frame, both protagonists, story hooks |
| Distribution | Effectively YouTube-only | All platforms simultaneously |
| Views in 24h | 93m on YouTube | 69m YouTube, 475m all platforms |
| Dislikes | 250,000+ | ~63,000 |
| Support material | Minimal | 70 screenshots, 8 character bios, 6 regions, 63 Mbps version |
RockstarINTEL’s explanation for the lower YouTube figure is straightforward: Trailer 1 had an announced date and time, so an audience was waiting for it, and it was the first time anyone had seen the game at all.
Miami New Times put the tonal shift best — the first trailer showed Vice City like an HBO series, the second is closer to Dexter.
What the trailer did not contain
No gameplay. Den of Geek is explicit about this, and it is the single most important qualifier on every mechanical theory above. Everything about gyms, property customisation, weapon modification and RPG progression is inferred from cutscene footage.
Digital Foundry’s technical read of the same footage: lighting built entirely on ray-traced global illumination with no rasterised fallback, filtered shadows in the RDR2 style, ray-traced reflections on rivers, screen-space reflections on larger water and glass. Their estimate of the capture was 1152p with FSR1, probably at 30fps. They flagged hair rendering as the weak point. More on that in the hidden details breakdown, and every vehicle in these frames is catalogued separately.
The closing shot: a road along the water at sunset, palms along the shoulder and the city skyline in the haze. Still from Trailer 2. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
An Extended Look premieres on August 27, 2026: Netflix at 3 p.m. ET, then free on YouTube and Rockstar’s site at 9 p.m. ET. It is the first time any of this gets tested against footage of someone actually playing.
Sources
- Rockstar Games — official Grand Theft Auto VI site
- GameSpot — GTA 6 Trailer 2 breakdown
- GameSpot — the song in Trailer 2 and its lyrics
- Dexerto — 10 things you missed in GTA 6 Trailer 2
- Den of Geek — Trailer breakdown, soundtrack and easter eggs
- IGN — GTA 6 Trailer 2 fan theories
- Miami New Times — Miami locations in the new GTA 6 trailer
- RockstarINTEL — Trailer 2 hits 69 million views in 24 hours
- TechRadar — 475 million views in 24 hours
- GTABase — GTA 6 Trailer 2 is out now
