World
Under some strange circumstances, Rockstar broadcast the first (official) gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most-anticipated game of the year. Here’s everything you need to know.
Read full story on theguardian.com →
Games — Keza MacDonald and Keith Stuart
And with that … we’re going to wrap up for the night (or day, depending where you are). If you want to watch the Grand Theft Auto VI extended look yourself, at 9pm ET/2AM BST it will have passed its inconvenient period of Netflix exclusivity and will be viewable on YouTube via Rockstar’s channel. Thanks for joining us, and roll on 19 November …
For me, as a Miami Vice fan of olde, all I really want to do in this game is drive a black Ferrari Daytona Spyder along an endless highway while In the Air Tonight plays on the car radio. If it can deliver that, it might have to be instant five stars.
Easy: gator wrestling. It’s (fictional) Florida, after all. How about you?
Keza, if you could ask for ONE feature to be added to the game based on what you saw tonight, what would it be?
It also really is a shame that a lot of what was just shown was leaked earlier this week – actually we know more from the leaks than from that trailer. Rockstar’s legal team has been on an absolute mission trying to delete all of that from the internet, but a lot of damage was done.
It’s hard to get TOO excited about racing around Vice City – we have had several excellent Forza Horizon games in the 13 years since the last GTA game, which have satisfied my desire for vehicular tourism. However, we also saw a whole raft of other stuff there: lifting weights on the beach, playing pool, basketball, hunting, kayaking … There’s evidently not exactly a shortage of things to do other than driving and shooting. GTA has always been more about the worlds than the action for me, so that’s reassuring to see. I do wonder how focused the game is going to be on Jason and Lucia: whether I’ll feel pulled through by their story, wanting to know what happens to them, or whether I’ll spend most of my time distracted by absolute nonsense, as I was for most of my time with GTA V. I spent a LOT of time on pointless bike rides up mountains in that game.
While Keza is formulating her reply to my question, I just have to add this: look at what is at the top of the trending table on Bluesky …
I don’t think there was anything in here that I really didn’t expect. If I’d have written a bingo card of GTA moments before the start, I would have ticked every box by the end. But it does look amazing and I was glad that, so far, they seem to have nailed what they’ve rarely even tried before: an actual functioning romantic relationship between two playable characters.
Keza, has anything excited you about the extracurricular stuff in the game? It seems like a lot of racing?
What do you reckon overall, Keith? Has this moved the needle for you at all or was it pretty much exactly what you expected?
I gotta say, it IS good watching a female character as an active participant in a Grand Theft Auto game rather than someone to whom violence is happening – though it would be unwise to expect anything other than large quantities of violent misanthropy from a GTA game.
Many of the people we’ve seen Jason and Lucia working with/for seem to be the most insufferable jerks on the American continent (another GTA staple, that at its best this series satirises but also mirrors the worst excesses of the hyper-capitalist US).
Well, that’s it. I was hoping for some interview footage with the dev team, or a voiceover with a few behind-the-scenes details, but it was basically a very long trailer with some gameplay thrown in. Still, the visuals – captured on a PS5 – are truly staggering, and we got to see a bit more of how Jason and Lucia will function as characters.
Anyone who played GTA V or GTA: Vice City will feel really at home in this world. It is the familiar milieu of clubs, gun stores, swanky offices and lowlife characters living in dingy apartments. It’ll be interesting to see what Rockstar does with this world to make it prescient and timely – to move its sardonic vision on from GTA V.
This whirlwind tour of different missions, characters and locations is somewhat disorientating (which, to be fair, is an accurate reflection of the overwhelming experience that is playing a GTA game) – the only constants are Jason and Lucia, whose story and relationship will presumably anchor the chaos.
The next section is all about the nightlife of Vice City. Rockstar loves to capture the club and music scenes of the cities it depicts, spending months meeting real-life music acts and club owners. There’s going to be a full day/night cycle so plenty of time to sample the nocturnal scene. This ends with another deal, this time in a glossy skyscraper, where cocaine is abundantly available. It goes all Scarface again as a shootout erupts. We see Lucia texting Jason to warn him the place is crawling with enemies. Phones are definitely going to be a major part of the game, apparently including a busy social network platform. A shootout in an office has glass flying and tables being turned over. There’s a cover system and a bullet-time mechanic. This is reminding me of Rockstar’s almost forgotten Max Payne 3.
It looks like the duo have joined the crew of flashy bank robber Raul Bautista. But now we get a quick look at the highlights of the bay side area, and a super cut of Jason and Lucia robbing jewellery stores, meeting very annoying social media influencers, dirt bike racing and parachuting out of a plane over a truly mesmerising cityscape. Clearly, there is going to be a LOT to do when you’re not holding up stores.
And here comes the first police car chase. We’ve heard the cops are going to be a LOT harder to shake in GTA VI. Although Lucia has managed it quite easily.
Cut to a rooftop bar with Jason and Lucia meeting drug runner Brian and his partner. Behind them an incredible skyline of Vice City. This town looks enormous. Through a series of jump cuts Brian talks us through Jason’s history in low-level crime. It’s all very cinematic – as usual. Jason and Lucia have a feisty relationship, constantly arguing over the details of their mission.
Soundtrack check: Prefab Sprout – Cars and Girls. The hits keep coming.
The fact that Jason and Lucia have just walked into a fancy rooftop bar called “Effluvia” indicates that the puerile puns in the names of in-game shops and businesses are still very much present.
Cut to titles … Then we’re back with Jason and Lucia at her apartment preparing for a night out. The visual detail in here is astonishing. From the pink patterned wallpaper to the leopard skin sofa throw. And it looks like you can watch TV as you could in GTA V – cue satirical commercials for free-range burgers.
The duo drive out to their destination in a rather crappy convertible – I’d steal something better before doing anything else. Yay, they’re playing Depeche Mode’s People Are People! Rockstar always delivers on the soundtrack.
The TV is on in Jason and Lucia’s apartment. Grand Theft Auto’s fictional TV and radio shows are always a highlight of the games – equal parts satirical and spectacularly juvenile. I still think about the Republican Space Rangers from GTA IV.
Ah yes, it’s a drug den. We’re in familiar GTA territory here: narcotics, smart phones, tattooed gangsters and a police raid. The duo shoot their way out of the room – the gunplay is very familiar to the series – third-person over the shoulder. I’m getting a distinct True Romance/Leon vibe to this chaos.
These closeup slow-motion kill shots are giving me flashbacks to Fallout 3 and its slightly sickening VATS violence.
As we watch this, let’s remember what it took to make it: GTA 6’s budget has run to at least a billion dollars, it has been under development for over 10 years, and it is the work of at least 2,000 individual people. There is no other developer working in video games with the luxury of this much time and money. This game is the ultimate example of the excess of blockbuster development, and what can be achieved under that model.
That model, of course, requires a huge amount of effort and dedication from the hundreds of people working at Rockstar’s Edinburgh studio, Rockstar North – many of whom are currently fighting for union recognition. Rockstar faced allegations of union-busting over some firings that occurred in 2025, which has since galvanised employees’ unionisation efforts. Read our report on that here:
Related: Grand Theft Auto workers seek union recognition after mass firings
So we’re going straight into a mission here with Jason and Lucia walking into an apartment building, looking to complete a job for local businessman and night club owner Boobie Ike. They’re picking something up. Judging by the guy at the door, it’s not going to be takeaway.
So before the Netflix extended preview starts, a quick recap. GTA VI is set in the state of Leonida, which is Rockstar’s version of Florida. The two playable lead characters are Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, low-ranking operatives for the local smuggler, Brian Heder, but now they’re looking for a way out. Can they escape Vice City or will they be dragged down into the murk by the alligator of petty crime?
All of that pales in comparison to the last week’s set of leaks, though, which have shown an awful lot of the finished game. Rockstar called the leak “devastating” in a statement, and has been aggressively pursuing the perpetrators.
Earlier this year, another hacker group named ShinyHunters also threatened to release stolen data:
Related: Hacker group threatens to release Grand Theft Auto VI data in Rockstar Games attack
Good evening everyone. Welcome to Vice City! As you may have seen, this month has seen a series of GTA VI leaks distributed across the internet by a hacker (or hacker group) named Cyberleek. Did they spell “leek” like the vegetable on purpose? We may never know.
Anyway, the leaks have taken the form of short video clips from the game showing different aspects, and hinting at some of the major new features. We’ll try to avoid spoilers on here, but Polygon has a story on the latest batch.
The first major Grand Theft Auto 6 leak happened back in 2022, when a teenager breached Rockstar’s internal Slack channel and posted around 90 minutes of in-development video footage. The British teenager behind that hack was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in 2023. Here’s a quick primer on what happened then:
Related: Grand Theft Auto 6 leak: who hacked Rockstar and what was stolen?
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s GTA VI live blog! I’m Keza MacDonald, video games editor, and along with our games correspondent Keith Stuart I’ll be taking you through all the context around the upcoming reveal of the biggest game of the decade.
In about 15 minutes, Rockstar Games will broadcast the first gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI via Netflix. This game – more than a decade in the making – is sure to be one of the most successful (and most expensive) games ever made, quite probably the most successful, when it releases on 18 November. But there have been some strange circumstances surrounding its slow reveal over the past year or so, not least a number of leaks that mean many gamers will have seen a lot of what’s about to be shown already.
For me, as a Miami Vice fan of olde, all I really want to do in this game is drive a black Ferrari Daytona Spyder along an endless highway while In the Air Tonight plays on the car radio. If it can deliver that, it might have to be instant five stars.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Keza MacDonald and Keith Stuart. Published 27 Aug 2026, 08:02 pm.
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