Trailer 1
December 2023. Leaked a day early, broke every viewing record on YouTube, and set the tone with a Tom Petty song.
The first trailer arrived in December 2023, brought forward by a few hours after it leaked, and became the most watched video game trailer ever published within its first day.
What it established
Almost everything the game was about, in ninety seconds. Two protagonists rather than one. A modern-day Vice City rather than the 1980s. A state called Leonida rather than a single city. And a tone built on real Florida absurdity: bodycam footage, phone video, people filmed being arrested, alligators walking into buildings.
That last part was the genuine surprise. The trailer leaned heavily on the aesthetics of viral local news and social video, which is a very different register from the film-poster framing of Grand Theft Auto V's marketing.
The music
Love Is a Long Road by Tom Petty, from 1989. Not an eighties Miami pastiche and not current, which set an expectation the second trailer confirmed: this soundtrack is going to range much wider than the synth-and-neon shorthand people assumed.
The leak
It went out early because it had already gone out. Rockstar published rather than fight the spread, which is roughly the opposite of how the studio handled the 2022 development breach.
What it did not show
No gameplay. No interface. No mechanics. Everything about how the game actually plays waited until the Extended Look nearly three years later, which is a long time to hold an audience on a mood piece.
What is not known
Rockstar has never published a shot list or confirmed most of the locations glimpsed in it. A large amount of the community mapping work is built on freeze-framing this trailer, and much of that remains inference.
Related: Trailer 2, the Extended Look.