GTA 6 Trailer 1 record: 90 million YouTube views in the first 24 hours

Two days after the reveal, Guinness World Records confirmed that Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 had taken three records at once. It logged 90,421,491 views in its first 24 hours, making it the most-viewed video game trailer on YouTube in a day and the most-liked video game trailer on the platform with 8.9 million likes in that window.¹

Rockstar founder Sam Houser's comment to Guinness once the numbers were confirmed was that the studio was thrilled to be able to share its new vision with players everywhere, a short line that stood in for what was otherwise a fairly quiet response from Rockstar itself; the studio let the record speak for the trailer rather than issuing further marketing around it.¹

The record that travelled furthest

The third record is the one that travelled furthest outside gaming. The trailer became the most-viewed non-music YouTube video in 24 hours, beating MrBeast's Every Country On Earth Fights For $250,000, which had managed 59.4 million views in the same window after its August 2023 upload. That comparison is what pulled general entertainment press into covering a game trailer as a video phenomenon rather than only as gaming news.¹

How the market reacted

Financial press coverage in the days after the reveal reported that Take-Two's stock rose in the trading sessions that followed the trailer's release, treating the viewership numbers as an early signal of consumer demand ahead of any sales data existing for the game itself.⁴

How it looks now

Trailer 1 has kept climbing. By September 2026 the YouTube upload had passed 294 million views.² For scale, when Trailer 2 arrived in 2025 Rockstar told The Hollywood Reporter that Trailer 1 had drawn 93 million views in its first day as a YouTube exclusive, a figure slightly ahead of the original Guinness-verified 24-hour count once a little more time had passed.³

Context matters here too: the December 2023 reveal arrived alongside Take-Two figures showing Grand Theft Auto V past 190 million lifetime units sold and Red Dead Redemption 2 past 81 million, which is the scale of built-in audience a Rockstar trailer starts from before a single new viewer is counted.⁵

Why Guinness got involved at all

Guinness World Records tracks video game and entertainment milestones as a matter of course, but it does not certify every big upload; a title has to clear an existing record by a wide enough margin to be worth adjudicating. Trailer 1 cleared three separate marks in the same news cycle, on YouTube's own most-viewed and most-liked video game trailer counts and on the platform-wide non-music record previously held by MrBeast, which is why Guinness treated it as three records rather than one.¹

None of that required Rockstar to do anything beyond publish the trailer and let the count run. There was no coordinated release across regions, no simultaneous multi-platform drop, and no paid promotion disclosed alongside the launch, which makes the number read as organic demand rather than a manufactured spike.¹²

It is also worth separating the record from the leak that preceded it by a few hours. A leaked, lower-quality rip circulating on social media the night before did not stop tens of millions of people from watching the official upload anyway, which suggests the record measures appetite for Rockstar's own presentation rather than simple curiosity about the game's existence.¹