As Chris Tapsell pointed out a while back,every GTA game is love wrapped in satire.
The series seems edgy because the satire is very broad, and often fairly misdirected.
Love of the genre, certainly.
Love of the excess, sure.
But love of the characters too and, more than anything, love of place.
I expected this because Rockstar’s first trailers tend to be vibe affairs.
But it’s still mainly vibes.
Look at Venice Beach in the morning with joggers checking each other out and the smog gathering.
All of which is to say, GTA 6’s trailer feels a bit different.
It’s a subtle thing, and I detected it in the first few seconds.
Pink and orange cocktail skies: surely this is Miami drawn in vibes?
We see a hero’s face very early on.
She gets a hero line.
This is characters first, characters and a bit of plot?
Plot might be too strong a word for it, but we’ll come back to that.
And while we spot this character again and again - is she up on the roof?
Is that her in the car?
- we also get a lot of more vibey stuff.
Here’s Miami’s seafront and the sea has a gloriously pearly sheen.
If you’re looking for signs of the game’s breadth, they’re everywhere.
Planes and yachts and speedboats and will I be able to do anything with that container ship?
But also social media and stick-ups and a fishtailing 1970s car churning up the earth.
If you’re looking for signs of the satirical side of Rockstar too, you’ll be happy.
Crocodiles - or alligators?
- breaking into convenience stores.
Billboards with cleverly stupid things written on them.
Someone twerking on top of a car.
But we knew that Rockstar could do Florida Man.
Not plot, then, but character and theme.
and “can I ride a flamingo?”
It’s telling you: people are at the centre of this.
They’re what this game is about from the off.
But the approach seems spot-on to me.
Yes, all of that.
But there’s romance here, too, and the giddiness of a story driven by unstable passion.
It’s satire, in other words, but that’s just a wrapper for the love.
