Do not laugh. These are words on the internet. They’re serious business.
We might have finally gotten that second trailer, the one I spent months on end staring at the moon 24 hours a day and electrocuted Nintendo’s nipples in anticipation of. We might have gotten a whole website worth of screenshots and character bios to dissect like forensic scientists scraping one of Trevor Phillips’ victims off the freeway.
But it’s never enough. It’s never enough, when GTA 6 now isn’t arriving until May 2026. From my bunker on Mount Chiliad, I’ll scour these morsels we’ve been thrown, I’ll hold the gun of truth up to their foreheads, just like Niko Bellic did to Vlad in that GTA 4 mission. I’ll find evidence of a drop date for GTA 6 trailer three.
You might argue that there’s no evidence we’re even due a third GTA 6 trailer – that we’ve already had two, and gotten all the info we could want ahead of the release date that’s now set in stone. I disagree. There has to be one. There’s always more when it comes to the biggest game launch since the fall of Constantinople invented the RTS genre.
Besides, GTA 5 had three protagonists, as did GTA 4 if you count the DLCs – the angels at Rockstar know the power that a holy trinity wields over us puny mortals.
So, I fire up trailer two for the seven thousandth time this week, because what if – I ask myself, in a voice that’s still some weird, monstrous amalgamation of every GTA protagonist ever – the GTA 6 trailer two/delay info drop has anything to tell us about a third GTA 6 trailer?
Trailer two begins with a joke. As I’ve told you, this is no laughing matter, but it’s Rockstar making a gag about those leaks, so I must – in my capacity as their devoted servant/fan who spends 22 and a half hours a day on Twitter – giggle for at least 20 minutes. The joke, though, serves a purpose. It’s convinced me that Rockstar knows the game’s afoot.
There’s a racoon in the background emerging from a bin. Frantically, I google which time of year the critters typically mate. Late January to mid-March. Could this be when GTA 6 trailer three is conceived ahead of deployment in the run up to that May release? Could it be when the trailer slinks out of the trash can onto our feeds? Maybe, but we’ll have to keep working.
Jason Duval is shirtless. I start counting the individual hairs on his very sweaty chest, which I’m staring at in an entirely respectful manner, because he’s a GTA protagonist and we are not worthy. I hold a ruler up to the screen and try to measure the exact diameter of his nipples, in the hope that maths might yield a clue. I have to give up. He’s just too damn sexy for me, a straight man in a basement, to concentrate.
We see Jason, now mercifully with a shirt on, driving, and then robbing a store. The cash register. Written on it is a number, upside down. Oh Rockstar, you shouldn’t have, you know I love dialling random phone numbers I find scrawled on walls around town. 305-555-0145. I ring it. There’s no answer, perhaps because I’ve stopped paying my phone bills in order to finance seven separate GTA+ subscriptions at once.
I panic, and resort again to maths. 3 + 5 is eight. 5 x 3 is 15. 1 + 4 + 5 is 10. 15 + 10 is 25. 2025. That just leaves the eight. The eighth month. August. AUGUST 2025 FOR GTA 6 TRAILER THREE? It seems implausible, but that’s never stopped me before. Hang on. The moon phases! The old reliable we relied on to predict trailer two.
NO WAY. August 8 will see the moon appear as a WAXING GIBBOUS! The very moon phase we thought would point to the second trailer’s arrival. This is incredible, I’ve cracked it. I must have. I can’t stop, though. There must be more info sneaking about like Michael De Santa during that mission for Solomon Richards if that’s cropped up.
Let’s see. There’s a freeway sign that hints at coming off at exit three to reach 9th Avenue in Southside Peacock Bay. Exit three = trailer three? Rockstar certainly has been peacocking with these trailers. Argh, is it trying to confuse me, to throw me off the scent and lose the five star wanted rating?
Further on, there’s a sign in a shop that reads “A new billionaire every week”. A new bit of GTA 6 info every week from now until May 26 next year? No, no, it can’t be. We’d all die from GTA 6 hype overload, foaming at the mouth like many of the numerous victims of substance abuse the GTA series has portrayed over the years.
There she is. Lucia Caminos. ‘Hot Together’ by The Pointer Sisters starts to play. Hang on. The Pointer Sisters. Hot Together was released in October 1986. It was their twelfth studio album, and eighth collaboration with producer Richard Perry. There’s that eight again, but this time with a twelve. The song was also used in the soundtrack for the 1987 movie Spaceballs, which came out on June 24. Could that be the time when we get something? The reveal of a GTA 6: Spaceballs edition?
As I try to work it out, I forget to press pause and the trailer keeps going. When I look back, Lucia’s bottom in a nice dress is filling the screen. Once again, I’m paralysed because things are just getting too sexy. Her bum swings from side to side as she walks. Once, twice, three times before the camera cuts away.
THREE. Did Lucia’s derriere just confirm trailer three is coming, beyond all doubt? As if to re-emphasise it, Jason then says “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right.”
I move on. The threes keep coming. Bae-Luxe of Real Dimez says ‘brrraapp’ three times while doing finger guns. People yell ‘Vice City, baby’, which is three words. Cal Hampton humps the air three times while urging someone to hook him up with something. Does he want early access to trailer three?
It’s all too much. I crash out and turn to the website. I try calculating the mean value of the number of screenshots of different characters and locations that Rockstar’s shared. It somehow adds up to five, which doesn’t seem to support my theory, so I disregard it as irrelevant.
I end up scrolling just past the bio of Lucia – the woman with the prophetic posterior.
“Jason’s friend and a fellow associate of Brian’s, Cal feels safest hanging at home, snooping on Coast Guard comms with a few beers and some private browser tabs open,” reads the bit about Cal Hampton. His name is three letters long, and there are two references to trios in the passage that prominently features a list of three.
“What if everything on the internet was true?”