Grand Theft Auto 6's first trailer arrived a year ago this month on December 4 following a leak. Like hyenas scavenging a dead elephant, in the days and weeks that followed fans picked it apart for every possible detail.
Now, after a year, and with no new trailer from Rockstar, we look back at the last 12 months since the world got its first (official) look at what will likely be one of the biggest games of the decade when it releases in the fall of 2025.
At the 1:05 mark in GTA 6's debut trailer, you can briefly spot a heavily tattooed man speaking to a judge via a webcam sentencing. This character seems to be based on a real-life Florida man who went viral in 2017 due to his looks and was dubbed the “Florida Joker.”
On December 5, 2023, Lawrence Sullivan—the Florida Joker himself—posted a video to TikTok in which he claimed Rockstar based the character on him and that they needed to “talk” to Sullivan. Then on December 11, Sullivan demanded Rockstar Games and its parent company Take-Two Interactive pay him $2 million.
“We gotta talk or [if] not you gotta give me like a mil or two,” Sullivan said. “Florida Joker ain’t having that, y’all took my likeness, y’all took my life.”
On December 13 2023, Sullivan claimed he was going to sue Rockstar over the whole situation. However, in March, he backed down and instead asked for a few hundred thousand to voice the character in-game. Rockstar has seemingly never responded to Sullivan’s threats or demands.
On December 5, 2024—a year after the trailer dropped—Sullivan uploaded a video on TikTok claiming his threats of a lawsuit were just him trolling. He then claimed that he was the reason the GTA 6 trailer was so popular. This saga continues.
With Rockstar revealing nothing new about GTA 6 since the first trailer, fans have become desperate to pull apart the teaser for any clues or hidden details.
That led one fan on Reddit to count all the holes in a window during one scene. Another person used math and science to figure out what kind of sunscreen an NPC was using. The NPC is seen for about one second in the trailer.
Meanwhile, since the trailer dropped, Take-Two’s boss hasn’t revealed much about GTA 6. He claims to not be worried about the graphically demanding game running on Xbox Series S and offered up a word salad about any potential PC port. He also hinted that GTA 6 might cost more than $70.
New info on GTA 6 is hard to find a year after the trailer. We do know that the game is targeting a fall 2025 release, something the trailer didn’t specify. Oh, and despite some fans feeling it sounds a lot like him, Troy Baker said he isn’t voicing the man seen in the trailer. So that’s... something new?
And so, here we are. A year has passed since Rockstar finally provided the world with its first look at GTA 6. Now, fans are so desperate for the next trailer that they are looking everywhere for clues about when it might arrive.
A popular theory involved the phases of the moon as seen in an advertisement for a new GTA Online update and indicated that a new trailer might arrive on November 22. That theory, like all of them, was wrong, and fans are still waiting.
Will we have to wait until 2025 for the second trailer? At this point, that seems likely to be the case. But Rockstar is unpredictable, so who knows? Perhaps on December 31, an hour before midnight, the publisher will drop the second trailer and break the internet once again.
