Surprising no one, the new trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI – the slumbering colossus many (perhaps erroneously) believe will rouse the video game industry – is the talk of the town. The masses are enamored with the trailer’s graphics and its depiction of what seems to be a legitimately likable, loving main character couple. Websites and content creators have posted well over 15 lists breaking down 15 details you might have missed. But a trailer everybody’s watched and a well-crafted trailer are two different things.
Despite amassing a truly astounding number of views, GTA VI’s second trailer didn’t land for everyone. This is not to say that the game will be bad or that Rockstar somehow dropped the ball, but rather that making a trailer, like any other mode of storytelling, is an art unto itself – one that goes far beyond the simple act of layering music atop footage.
Derek Lieu, a professional game trailer editor whose work you’ve almost certainly encountered – trailers for Half-Life Alyx, Among Us, Psychonauts 2, Riven, Spelunky 2, Firewatch, Dead Cells, Viewfinder, and Stray Gods, to name a few – believes that GTA VI’s second trailer doesn’t do its subject justice. The game, he told Aftermath, looks incredibly impressive, but after watching the trailer numerous times, he doesn’t find himself knowing or feeling as much as he’d like.
"[The game] looks amazing. It looks great," Lieu told Aftermath. "A trailer is designed to do this thing well, which is to incite our emotions and show a bunch of stuff from this new thing that we haven't seen before. This trailer, or a bunch of B-roll with music over it, can kind of achieve the same thing. But that doesn't make it a good trailer. Just because people get hyped, doesn't mean it's a good trailer. If this was a better trailer, then people would be that much more hyped. They would feel, they would care."
Just because people get hyped, doesn't mean it's a good trailer.
One of the trailer’s biggest issues, according to Lieu, is a general lack of narrative. This might sound odd given how much of it is made up of cutscenes, but consider what we’ve learned by the end: There are two characters who we’re obviously supposed to root for, and we know they’re having a grand old crime-filled time in Vice City, but what are the stakes? Why is any of this happening?
"The only thing we know about these characters is: They do crime and they're a couple,” said Lieu. “We have no idea what their motivation is. Why are they doing crime? Are they being forced to do crime? What's the reason? By the time the first part with the landlord is over, that's, like, 30 seconds into the trailer – an immense amount of time.”
Lieu drew a comparison to a more effective variation on the theme from Rockstar’s own oeuvre:
“GTA IV's third trailer, where it's like ‘Niko, my cousin!’, you know [Niko] is a person who's come to the United States, you know they're an immigrant, you know their contact is in a really shitty apartment, but they have aspirations of more,” said Lieu. “You have all of that in one shot. That [moment] encompasses the whole story of GTA IV. There's probably something like that in GTA VI somewhere. At least let us know what [the characters] want, and that will make us care more and be interested in how they achieve that."
Lieu described Rockstar’s trailer output over the years as “uneven.” This, he said, is par for the course with trailers that are produced in-house – as opposed to those created by dedicated editors or agencies like Altar Creative, which has worked with Ubisoft on many occasions. While Lieu doesn’t know for certain if GTA VI’s trailer was produced in-house, he thinks it bears the hallmarks of one that was.
"Some places, in-house, are amazing,” he said. “Destiny 2, most of them are amazing. Blizzard, Overwatch, their stuff is amazing. Nintendo is kind of uneven, but the good stuff is really good."
In-house trailers, he said, often lean on viewers’ preexisting knowledge or excitement; they stop short of going the extra mile.
"The first Final Fantasy VII Remake trailers, I think, are also made in-house. They're terrible. The really good ones – they're really tightly edited and the music's done well – are edited by a place called Hammer Creative in Los Angeles. Those [first trailers] are incredibly random because [Square Enix] knows it's Final Fantasy VII. Everyone will recognize these scenes. They'll do the work for us. But Final Fantasy VII has great music. Put some amazing music under it. Make me remember all this stuff. It's such a wasted opportunity. We could be [up] here, emotion-wise, and instead, whether people realize it or not, they could be so much more excited."
You can give people room for speculation and reaction videos and stuff and have it be fun to watch.
Granted, GTA VI isn’t set to come out for another year, so perhaps Rockstar doesn’t have the necessary raw materials on hand to assemble a series of scenes that more explicitly lays out the game’s stakes. But Lieu finds that unlikely, given how video game trailers are typically made. He said that some triple-A studios will spend a month just capturing footage, meaning the process of editing together a trailer “can easily be multiple months.”
"I'm working on stuff that's for Summer Game Fest time,” he said. “A lot of these games are not super duper early, but there's still a lot of gray box stuff. So I make my draft of the trailer, and then we polish up the things that need to be done for that."
There’s also the matter of Rockstar’s infamous commitment to littering trailers with as many hints and easter eggs as possible, to inspire the kind of free marketing the aforementioned “details you missed” lists provide. But Lieu doesn’t believe those sorts of smaller flourishes need to come at the expense of a trailer’s storytelling.
"You can give people room for speculation and reaction videos and stuff and have it be fun to watch,” said Lieu. “If you look at the Tears Of The Kingdom trailers, it's Legend Of Zelda, so everyone's gonna speculate about every single frame. The full trailer is completely epic. ... There's ups and downs, there's big, pivotal moments. If you look at that trailer in terms of its emotional weight, the graph of that would be [a series of taller and taller spikes, building to a huge crescendo]. GTA VI's is kinda [flat]."
Music is another area where GTA VI’s trailer, in Lieu’s eyes, falters when compared to other major game trailers – or even Rockstar’s previous work. Again, the drama and narrative of the trailer take a backseat, in favor of a song that’s just sort of… there. The song itself, “Hot Together” by The Pointer Sisters, fits the trailer’s vibe, but it’s inelegantly deployed despite Rockstar almost certainly having the resources to give it a proper cinematic treatment.
"So watch the trailer for [movie] Knives Out or It Takes Two's 'Better Together' trailer. Those both use licensed music, but they trailer-ized the music, which Rockstar has the money to do. Not all licensed music can just be put into a sequence and made into a trailer. If you look at Knives Out, that one, especially, is really customized. If you listen to the music during different parts of that trailer, you could really feel like 'Oh, this is the beginning, this is the middle, and this is the end.' But for [GTA VI], the energy just feels flat."
As Lieu sees it, all of these issues compound to make the trailer feel disconnected – like a series of unrelated moments rather than a cohesive work. For example, the first chunk of the trailer lingers on a day in the life of Jason Duval, a comically jacked Florida man who makes up one half of the game’s core power couple. But it doesn’t initially read like it’s trying to convey several related events from his perspective.
"That whole opening minute, I didn't even realize that the first scene where the landlord is saying, 'Go get me my money' connected with a shot of [Jason] slapping the guy and opening the register, which is, like, two shots later,” said Lieu. “It's so quick, too. It doesn't feel like 'This is a day in my life. This happens and this happens.’"
Not all licensed music can just be put into a sequence and made into a trailer.
These are, as far as Lieu sees it, fixable issues. They just require a little more signposting.
"The part where it's showing the two of them doing crime versus them having beers, there's space in there for really simple contrasts. They could be like 'To new beginnings' cut to [gunfire sounds] 'Hands on the floor!' to ask 'Oh, is this actually a new beginning?' To have that dramatic irony there. There' so many things you could do in there, but it just feels very disconnected. It's kind of forcing us to do the work in a not-interesting way."
This is not to say that trailers have to hand you everything upfront; some of the best trailers lure you in with a plethora of unanswered questions. They give you the basic premise followed by flashes of scenes that function almost as puzzle pieces. Lieu pointed to A24 movie trailers as an example.
"A24 movie trailers are really good at this, where you have an idea, and they show a lot of the movie after that. If you watch the trailer for Under The Silver Lake, the premise is that [Andrew Garfield’s character’s] girlfriend disappears, and there's a whole lot of stuff after that setup. All of it seems interesting, but none of it actually helps me understand what happens plot-wise, but it's interesting. It does a good job of [conveying] this context of this problem that needs to be solved and then 'These are things that we go through in order to do that.' But we don’t know how it turns out. We don’t even know which parts of the movie [we’re seeing].”
Given that we’re talking about Rockstar, one of the most notoriously secretive studios in the business, we can only speculate about the exact intentions underlying this trailer. But we can speak to the end result and the circumstances surrounding it. Last week, Rockstar announced that it was delaying GTA VI from 2025 to May of 2026. To those who’ve been waiting for over a decade to finally go on their latest, greatest, balmiest crime vacation, this might suggest trouble in paradise. Rockstar, then, needed to assuage concerns and keep the hype train moving full speed ahead.
And so, while you might be tempted to view a GTA VI trailer as an easy layup – after all, this game is going to sell more units than there are grains of sand on its meticulously rendered beaches – it does serve an important purpose. Every trailer, even for games whose success seems like a foregone conclusion, does.
"As big as Grand Theft Auto VI is,” Lieu said, “it's still important to control the news and keep things top of mind. It's just at a different scale."
