South Park just aired GTA 6 gameplay nobody's seen, and Rockstar supplied it

The newest GTA 6 gameplay didn't come from a trailer. It came from South Park. The episode "Guinea Pig on a Stick", the fourth of season 29, aired on Comedy Central on 28 October, and partway through it the boys and Randy sit down to watch a clip of the actual game.

Rockstar Games is thanked in the end credits. That's the detail that matters, because it means this isn't a fan mock-up or something the animators faked. Rockstar handed the show real footage.

What's in the clip

It's short, and it's very South Park. Jason's on Vice Beach in third person with the minimap up in the corner. A dog does its business on the sand, the owner bends down to clean it up, and Jason throws something at him. When the man turns round to fight, Jason hits him over the head with the bag of dog poop.

That's the whole clip. Rockstar's own trailers are mostly slow pans and story beats, so a bit of unscripted-looking nonsense on the beach is new, and it's the stuff people will actually spend their first week doing.

On the show, someone says "the graphics are seriously next level", and Cartman is about as happy as Cartman gets.

Why South Park's been on about it all season

This has been building for weeks. Season 29 opened with an episode that kept repeating "things will get better in November", and Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been calling GTA 6's release the "big change" coming that month. It's a joke about the 3 November midterms, with the game landing sixteen days later as the thing people are actually waiting for.

Up to now it's been a running line. This is the first time the gag has used Rockstar's own footage, and the show has history here: Red Dead Redemption 2 got a whole bit in 2018, and Cartman betrayed Kyle over Chinatown Wars back in 2009.

Is it really the first new gameplay since August?

That's how fans are describing it, and VGTimes repeats it, but nobody at Rockstar has said so. What's fair to say is it's footage we hadn't seen in the trailers or the Extended Look, and it shows the kind of throwaway beach interaction the game's NPCs are supposed to be full of.

Honestly, Rockstar giving a clip of Jason assaulting a man with dog mess to the one show guaranteed to make it worse is the most GTA marketing decision of the whole campaign. The game's out on 19 November. If you missed the episode, it's on Comedy Central.