Trailer 1

The first trailer came out in December 2023. It had already leaked, so Rockstar put it out a few hours early, and inside its first day it broke YouTube's 24-hour record for a non-music video.

Two leads, a modern Vice City and a whole state

In ninety seconds it set up almost everything the game is about. There are two protagonists this time, where you'd usually get one. Vice City is back, but it's the present day and not the 1980s. The setting is a whole state called Leonida, with the city as one part of it. And the tone is built on real Florida absurdity: bodycam footage, phone video, people filmed being arrested, alligators wandering into buildings.

It opens on Lucia, in a correctional facility, being asked why she's there. That's the first thing anybody ever saw of the game's story, and the later trailers keep coming back to it: Trailer 2 shows her walking out, and the launch trailer opens with her calling Jason from prison.

That last part was the real surprise. The trailer leans hard on the look of viral local news and social video, and that's a long way from the film-poster framing Rockstar used to sell Grand Theft Auto V.

A Tom Petty song from 1989

The song is Love Is a Long Road by Tom Petty, from 1989. It isn't an eighties Miami pastiche, and it isn't anything current either. That set up an expectation the second trailer went on to confirm: this soundtrack's going to range a lot wider than the synth-and-neon shorthand people had assumed.

Out early because it was already out

It went out early because it had already gone out. Rockstar just published it and didn't try to fight the spread, which is roughly the opposite of how the studio handled the 2022 development breach.

What you can read at 4K

We went back to Rockstar's 2160p master in September and read every bit of text in it. Our scene count puts the trailer at 43 shots. The full list is in our 4K text read, but the highlights are:

• A roadside billboard reading IT CURE EMOTIONS! and AMERICA'S FAVORITE DISSOCIATIVE!, with small print about patients aged 18 to 65 and something lasting more than 4 hours
• HOTEL DIXON in vertical neon and BOARDWALK in blue neon on the night street with the Cheetah
• The Cheetah's number plate, which reads LEONIDA and CH33TAH
• A timestamp of 09:58:47 on the security camera in the alligator store, and backlit letters spelling VICE

Some of it doesn't resolve even at 4K. A teal neon sign ending in UNE and a shop sign ending in OOD stay unreadable, and we're not guessing at them.

No gameplay at all

There's no gameplay in it, no interface and no mechanics. You had to wait for the Extended Look nearly three years later to see how the game actually plays, and that's a long time to hold an audience on a mood piece.

What isn't known

Rockstar has never published a shot list for it, and it hasn't confirmed most of the locations you can glimpse in it. The text on the signs is readable now, but what a sign says and where that place sits on the map are two different questions. A lot of the community's mapping work is built on freeze-framing this one trailer, and much of that work is still inference.

It also never says what Lucia did to end up inside. Three trailers later, Rockstar still hasn't said.

Related: Trailer 2, the Extended Look, the launch trailer.