I’m sitting here in my hotel room in Cologne, Germany, which is serving me as a home base throughout the week of Gamescom 2026. It’s about 10 minutes until 9PM on Thursday, August 27 and I’m fumbling around with my Netflix login, which is stuck somewhere between me not remembering which email I originally signed up with and the app reckoning with my newfound geolocation. We get there in the end, and with a refreshing alcoholic beverage in one hand and my iPad Air in the other, I watch the global premiere of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look.
For 26 minutes, I’m shown a very carefully directed and edited showcase of the game, somewhere between a traditional trailer and a gameplay “deep dive,” though this one bears no developer narration or supplementary reading. Rockstar Games’ strategy here is not to convince you to buy GTA 6 via a sales pitch – it knows it will get your money, or probably already has it. No, the mission here is to capture your attention for that full runtime, and to evoke the feeling that you already have the game in your hands. “In just three months, this will be you,” it whispers.
Rockstar doesn’t need to market GTA 6 to anybody, because it markets itself. This miniscule drop of what will eventually be an impossibly-huge game will be talked about for the days and weeks to come, by absolutely everyone who’s watched it. My messages and group chats are already rife with it. “Did you see the GTA 6 trailer? Holy shit!”, “Is that the shotgun sound from Red Dead Redemption 2??”, “Phil Collins at 21:43.” This video, in which nobody from Rockstar Games or anyone representing them says a single world to explain what we’re seeing, is being dissected and examined at an unprecedented scale. Well played, team.
Which is why, even just a few months out from its November 19 release date, Grand Theft Auto VI still does not feel real. Even after looking at what is claimed to be real-time PS5 footage with my own eyeballs, it remains this impossible, intangible thing. The single biggest video game of at least the last decade, by whichever metric you’re thinking of. Something that, with the exception of a total of two journalists and anyone braving the recent leaks, everyone outside of Rockstar has seen the exact same 26 curated minutes of. I think it’s because it’s still so difficult to pin down, to fathom the impact this game will have, no less because we still don’t know anywhere near enough about the game to quantify it against anything else out there.
There is, obviously, a fair amount one can glean from careful observation of the Extended Look trailer. We can see first-hand the astonishing level of detail on show, where it seems that just about every single square inch of this enormous open world has been hand-authored down to the smallest consideration. A world has been imagined right down to the difference in wear on a shop floor versus a night club versus a footpath, the kind of stuff only a decade of work by thousand of hands, billions of dollars and some light (alleged) union busting gets you. It’s not just a feat of technology but one of labour, for better and for worse.
We can also gather a lot of information about how this new GTA has evolved its gameplay and world simulation. It’s clear that this one is taking a lot of cues from Rockstar’s work on Red Dead Redemption 2, and perhaps even a little of its ambitions with the more grounded Grand Theft Auto IV. We’re moving further away from a chaos simulator to immersive role play in the context of a blockbuster crime story, and systems have been changed or updated to reflect that. A wanted system that considers your ongoing criminal profile and your ability to genuinely conceal your actions, cars that have security systems you’ll need to learn to exploit before even thinking about stealing them.
Even the way that Grand Theft Auto V’s multi-protagonist setup has been retooled and reconsidered here is in service of immersion and realism. Jason and Lucia are independent simulations, both playable and seamlessly switchable, but always running their own logic in the context of the world, the story and the decisions you make minute-to-minute. You could infer from what’s shown in the trailer that your choice to open a door for Lucia, as Jason, may be the difference in how effectively she has his back in a shoot-out later down the line or how she reacts in a story moment. That’s an impressive pitch, but again we’re all just watching the same trailer or reading the same IGN/NYT previews and speculating, here.
It’s hard to predict with any certainty the kind of impact GTA 6 will have when it launches in November, outside of the reasonable assumption that it will be fucking massive. It’s a game that still feels so far out of reach, no less because that’s been the strategy to date. You’d think seeing nearly half an hour of captured PS5 footage would solve that, but somehow the whole thing has become more speculative than ever – a clear success on the part of the Rockstar marketing engine.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be in millions of hands come November 19, 2026. I can’t even begin to imagine what happens after that.
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Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.