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A Vice-like grip on the world.
Image credit: Rockstar
GTA 6 is already breaking records despite being at least a year away from release.
The first trailer for the game, which Rockstar released ahead of schedule after it leaked on Monday, now holds the record for the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours which isn’t a music video, according to Guinness World Records.
This also makes it the most viewed video game reveal on YouTube, according to the organisation, reaching 90,421,491 views in 24 hours.
Despite only being a minute and a half long, there’s plenty of details we’ve spotted in the GTA 6 trailer, from references to GTA Online, a return to Vice City, and threads of the game’s plot.
The presence of social media is ripe for parody, as the Eurogamer news team discussed in the latest newscast, but the real-life parallels don’t end there. A short snippet just after the minute mark shows a man in a prison uniform with facial tattoos and he quickly gained attention for looking like Lawrence Sullivan, a tattoo model who went viral in 2017 for his resemblance to the Joker.
Sullivan responded to the trailer on TikTok on Tuesday. “You might have seen that character on GTA 6,” Sullivan said, “you know who they got that inspired by. By me.” He referenced his own moniker of Florida Joker, before sending a message to Rockstar. “GTA, we gotta talk,” he said, though it’s unclear if he was calling out the company for using his likeness without his permission or if he was extending a call for a deeper collaboration.
@lawrence.sullivan0 #florida #jokerchallenge #gta6 #gta6trailer #gta6new #facetattoo ♬ original sound – Lawrence Sullivan
According to Mike York, an animator who worked on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption, a lot of the footage is representative of how the game will look, and he stated Rockstar’s artists “really know how to push the consoles and the hardware to the limits” (thanks, VG247).
Rockstar has confirmed GTA 6 will release in 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. There’s been no word on a PC release yet.
