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While just about everyone has been pouring over the recent GTA 6 trailer – including us – there’s certain people who have a unique insight. And now one former Rockstar employee has given his own thoughts on the trailer.
Mike York worked at Rockstar for almost six years, and has credits on both Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. He’s since left the company and worked on plenty of other games – including God of War Ragnarok – but also posts reaction videos on his YouTube, with his latest breaking down the trailer. While many have grown sceptical of scenes that show things that look very different in the full game, York reassures viewers that won’t be the case here.
“A lot of the games you see are done with cinematics and then cut to a scene – and it’s not all in game, it’s kinda pre-rendered and then you see it. But everything that you see in a GTA game is all done in game. Every single cutscene, everything you roll in – if you see that building way in the back, you can go to that building. You can climb it, you can jump off it, right? This game is very elaborate and it takes them so long to make.”
York also touched upon the version of Vice City shown in the trailer, commenting “If you look at the way Rockstar does things, it’s not just a bigger city – everything in the city is expanded upon”(…) “There’s more people, there’s more cars, there’s more plant life, there’s more animals, there’s more hair on each character. Every single thing has been reworked and developed and pushed.”
Pointing out the NPCs in the beach and club scenes in particular, York talks about how many animations have gone into the trailer and by extension, the game. “That’s what Rockstar is really good at – they make it feel alive, and the only way to do that is to have hundreds and thousands of animations of things going on and so (…) every single person is doing something different, every single one of them is being unique in their own way, because that’s how people really act, right?”
We’re certainly excited to see if we’ll be able to say the same when 2025 finally does roll around and Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally with us when it lands on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. But to tide you over while we wait, we’ve been wondering about GTA 6’s wildlife in Vice City while Rockstar promise GTA 6 will “push the limits of what’s possible” in a story-driven open world game.
