GTA 6 has a working television, and we sat through an entire advert on it

The Extended Look runs twenty-six minutes and almost all of it's been written up already: the shooting, the wanted system, the two-character switch. We went through one three-minute section frame by frame instead, roughly five to eight minutes in, and the most interesting thing in it is something we haven't seen written up anywhere.

Jason walks into a kitchen, takes a drink out of the fridge, and an advert plays on the television. The whole thing runs thirty-five seconds, with an arc, a reveal and an end card, which is a lot more than the two-second background loop you'd expect on a TV in the corner.

The whole advert, beat by beat

The joke takes a while to arrive and it's better for it. It's a parody of the ingredient-origin advert, the kind that shows you a sunlit field for twenty seconds before it gets round to mentioning food, except here the hero's an empty bun and what it's dreaming about is being filled.

Then it closes on the only number in the whole thing. The card flips to BOX MEAL and adds ONLY 30,000 CALORIES in yellow. That's around a fortnight of eating for an adult, printed like a special offer. Thirty-odd seconds of pastoral reverence about where meat comes from, and the payoff is a figure that ought to be a warning, set in type like a discount.

The nature footage is where you can tell it cost money. Somebody rendered a whole pastoral scene for this, with a stream, boars, ducks, a hare and an elk shot close enough to count the hairs on, and it doesn't look like stock footage or the game engine doing a flyover. It was built to be looked at for six seconds and never again.

Four brands, read straight off the screen

The end card's legible at native resolution, and between it and a passing truck there are four brands. None of them appears anywhere else on this site, and we didn't see any of them named in the Extended Look write-ups we went through before publishing this.

Two details we loved. The sandwich's top bun is shaped like a hat, with a brim and a star stitched into the crown, so the western theme goes all the way down into the food. And the fries are called Lasso Fries, which means somebody sat and wrote a western pun for a carton that's on screen for four seconds.

Somebody made this for a room you can walk past

In-game television isn't new to this series. Grand Theft Auto IV had whole shows you could sit and watch, and Grand Theft Auto V kept that going. What's interesting is where something like this sits when a studio's deciding what to cut.

A thirty-five second advert with an original animated character, a rendered wildlife scene and a designed end card is a small production in its own right, and it's for something a player can just walk past. That's exactly what gets cut when a project runs late, and the game's nine weeks out.

One honest caveat. During the advert the camera cuts to the television full-frame, so what we're watching is partly a choice made by whoever edited the Extended Look. It doesn't tell us how much of it plays if you just stand in the room, and Rockstar hasn't said.

The fridge is doing more work than the dialogue

Before the advert, Jason opens the fridge, and the door's covered in handwriting that reads cleanly at full resolution.

One pink note says NAILS ON FRIDAY, with what look like polish shade names listed underneath it. A second says Mon 3pm, then ask for power strip??, then, in brackets, take painkillers this time.

That last line does all the work. Nobody says it out loud, nobody explains it, and it still tells you this is a recurring appointment that hurts and that she's been caught out by before. Put it next to the tattoo studio Rockstar's shown in its own press material and it isn't hard to guess what the appointment is. The game's told you something about a character without a line of dialogue.

There's also a Fleeca Bank magnet on the door, the same bank chain the series has used since Grand Theft Auto V, and photographs of people at a beach and at what looks like a festival.

Vice City is being built while you drive through it

One more thing from the same three minutes. The Azteca Gold truck is sitting in traffic in front of a mid-rise with scaffolding up its full height and a tower crane over the top.

Active construction isn't something this series has spent much effort on before. It's expensive scenery that doesn't do anything, and it's there to tell you the city has money coming into it, which is the same thing Port Gellhorn's signage says in reverse two hundred miles up the coast.

The shot the sequence ends on makes the same point from the other side. Jason and Lucia are out on the balcony of a low stucco block with FOR RENT in an upper window and NOW RENTING, tel: 305-555-0127 painted along the parapet, directly across the street from a glass tower with its own name on the hoarding. The number uses 305, which is the real Miami area code.

So you've got one street with two economies on it, and the to-let sign's on the older one. Rockstar hasn't said a word about what's happening to that neighbourhood, and it hasn't needed to.

Where these frames came from

We want to be exact about the sourcing, because it decides what we will and won't do with it.

Rockstar's own upload of the Extended Look is age restricted and needs a signed-in session, so the copy we cut from is 1080p, and we couldn't use one of the 2160p masters we used for the trailer frame browser. The section covers roughly five to eight minutes in. Everything above is described from what's legible on screen, and nothing's inferred from a leak.

For the same reason these frames aren't going into the frame browser. That page promises a verified timestamp against the source for every shot on it, and we can't verify these to the second. A dataset's only worth having if every row in it is true, and one approximate row would quietly drag down the eighty-eight that are exact.