‘GTA 6’ Launch Trailer Justifies Game’s Big Price Tag

On Thursday, developer Rockstar Games (Red Dead Redemption 2, Bully) released what it is calling the “launch trailer” for its month-away masterpiece, the most highly-anticipated video game in, well, the history of video games.

The trailer opens with Jason, who “got in some trouble in the Army,” buffing out the boat of someone who definitely qualified for a boat loan. As for Jason, well, “They don’t give loans— anything to people like me,” he says via voiceover. And then Lucia calls from her guy prison. Game on.

Guns, cars and one very lucky iguana soon fill the screen. A less-fortunate snake, a cash shower and one real shower later, the depth of the happy couple’s Bonnie & Clyde relationship pops off the screen. It’s just them against the world Vice City, all set to the Justice single, “Flower in a Hurricane” feat. Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

“Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them,” the official game synopsis from Rockstar, a Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. label, reads. “But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive.”

Find somebody who looks at you like Jason and Lucia.

Rockstar took eight years developing GTA 6, which had more starts and stops than some of the game’s banged up beater vehicles. It cost the company in the ballpark of $1 billion to $1.5 billion to make.

Grand Theft Auto VI is set to (finally) be released on Nov. 19, 2026, which is likely to be the biggest called-out-sick day in the history of America’s workforce. (Players will be able to begin the lengthy process of preloading the giant game on Nov. 12; there will be no physical version of GTA 6.)

There will be two versions available: the base game will run you $79.99 and the “Ultimate” version $99.99. Grand Theft Auto VI: Ultimate Edition ”amplifies the experience” of the base game with “an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story,” per Rockstar.

Watch the game’s launch trailer — with all gameplay captured on a PlayStation 5 — here: