‘Grand Theft Auto 6’ trailer released a day early following a leak

Rockstar Games released the first trailer of the much-anticipated “Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 6” video game on Monday evening. The trailer was originally expected to premiere at 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday but that plan was disrupted by a leak Monday by a now-deleted X, formerly Twitter, account.

The company tweeted: “Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube.”

The trailer (with the late Tom Petty’s “Love is a Long Road” serving as the soundtrack) shows that “GTA 6” is set in Vice City, a Miami-derived metropolis that also served as the locale for an earlier edition that came out in 2002. The game is expected sometime in 2025.

The game’s latest instalment will also star the series’ first female protagonist, Lucia, along with an unnamed male lead. The trailer promises beaches, swimsuits and pink sunsets along with the racing cars and crime.

The new game also seems to depict social media within the world of “GTA”; we see cellphone-like videos of incidents like an alligator being pulled out of a pool and a woman twerking on top of a moving car.

The last edition of “GTA” was released a decade ago, in 2013. Since the first edition launched in 1997 it has grown into one of the most popular video game franchises, built on letting players steal cars, flee police, commit other crimes and try to move up the criminal ladder; the “GTA 6” trailer shows Lucia and a male character, both masked, entering a store while holding guns in an apparent armed robbery.

“Grand Theft Auto V” has sold 190 million copies and generated approximately $8.4 billion (U.S.) in revenue, and sales forecasts are high this time around, too.

“We have talked about expecting over $8 billion in net bookings,” parent company Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. CEO Strauss Zelnick said in an interview earlier this year.

With files from Bloomberg