GTA 6 revealed: Trailer 1, the state of Leonida and the Coming 2025 promise

Rockstar had booked the first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer for 9:00 a.m. ET on December 5, 2023, and put a countdown on its own homepage to say so.⁴ A leaked copy forced its hand: the trailer went up on YouTube on the evening of December 4 instead, roughly thirteen to fifteen hours early, after clips began circulating on TikTok and X.³⁵⁶

The leak and Rockstar's response

Coverage from the day frames it as a straightforward pre-emption rather than a planned early drop: once a rip of the trailer was loose on social media, Rockstar had little reason to sit on the finished version until the next morning. The studio's own social accounts pointed fans back to the official YouTube upload rather than the leaked copy once it went live.⁶

Take-Two's press release, issued the same day, is the cleanest statement of what was actually announced. Grand Theft Auto VI was confirmed for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2025, and Rockstar founder Sam Houser framed it as another push at what the studio can do with story-driven open worlds. The release also placed the game in the context of Rockstar's back catalogue, noting Grand Theft Auto V had sold more than 190 million units and Red Dead Redemption 2 more than 81 million worldwide.¹

What the reveal established

• The game is set in the state of Leonida, with Vice City at its centre.²
• PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S only. No PC version was mentioned.¹
• A 2025 release window, shown on screen as a Coming 2025 card.¹⁵
• Lucia as a playable lead, introduced in a prison interview at the top of the trailer.⁵
• Grand Theft Auto VI arrives as a sequel to two of the best-selling games in the medium's history.¹

Rockstar published its own Newswire post the next morning at the originally scheduled time, describing the game as heading to Leonida and the neon-soaked streets of Vice City.² The 2025 window did not survive: the game was later dated May 26, 2026, then moved again to November 19, 2026.⁵

How the moment was measured

Two days after the reveal, Guinness World Records confirmed the trailer had taken three simultaneous records, logging over 90 million views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Houser's comment to Guinness afterward was that Rockstar was thrilled to share its new vision with players everywhere, a line that reads differently once you know the trailer only existed publicly because a leak forced the timeline forward.⁷

Why the reveal landed so hard

Part of the reaction was simple arithmetic: Rockstar had not shown a frame of a new mainline Grand Theft Auto since Grand Theft Auto V's own trailers over a decade earlier, and the studio had spent almost two years saying only that development was underway.⁴ When a real, finished piece of marketing finally existed, even a leaked and compressed copy was treated as a major event by outlets that had spent that gap covering rumours instead of facts.⁶

The platforms and window named in the Take-Two release also mattered on their own terms. Confirming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S rather than a cross-generation release, and putting a 2025 window on screen rather than a vaguer promise, gave the wider industry its first concrete data point for planning around the game, from retailer pre-order pages to competing publishers' own release calendars.¹