Grand Theft Auto VI

Rockstar Games released a new trailer last week for Grand Theft Auto VI, which comes out in May 2026. The viral trailer (over 100 million views in its first week) features six songs, mostly used as diegetic or source music, edited to feel as though they could be coming from a car stereo and heard by the characters in the game. Still, the trailer narrates rather than demonstrates, so the immersivity of simulated gameplay has given way to storytelling, albeit winning players through nostalgia for earlier versions of GTA and the trailers’s impressive CGI and soundtrack.

This cinematic video-game trailer opens into a Florida-inspired coastal community, and at 0:11 we see main character Jason fixing his roof. Jason has a conversation with drug-runner Brian as strains of Jay Ferguson’s 1977 song “Thunder Island” play faintly in the background.

At 0:27 we cut to a shot of Jason behind the wheel of a car, and now “Child Support” by Zenglen, a Haitian compas band, is playing. It’s louder in the mix than the first song was, as though Jason has cranked his car stereo. It also foreshadows the upcoming references to Haitian culture. “Child Support” continues into the next scene at 0:32, where Jason steps into a store to slap its attendant and empty the cash register. Jason’s slap is synched to the beat of the music, as is the smack of his fist on the cash register.

Back in his car, at 0:34, Jason is driving along the freeway, and we hear British New Wave band Wang Chung’s 1986 hit “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” as if it is coming through the car stereo. We hear exactly two measures of the song while he’s driving, and conveniently, it is the song’s title hook. The visuals cut on the beat, at 0:38, to a shot of Jason pumping iron on the beach. He’s even lifting the barbells in time with Wang Chung, which continues in the background at the beach, presumably playing from his car speakers.

At 0:41, as Jason is walking out of a convenience stores with a six-pack of beer in his hand, Tammy Wynette’s 1987 country song “Talkin’ to Myself Again” begins playing in the background, and continues from 0:45-0:50 as he drives past a Haitian flag mural.

But the real star of this soundtrack is “Hot Together.” When we meet Lucia at 1:02 as she is released from prison, we fade into The Pointer Sisters’ 1986 hit and it sets the mood perfectly for nearly the entire remainder of the trailer. Interestingly, “Hot Together” doesn’t pretend to be diegetic, as it flows seamlessly from scene to scene in the ensuing montage where we see Lucia and Jason settling back into their relationship and life of crime.

We pivot out of The Pointer Sisters’ mood just once, from 2:09-2:18, while a commercial for Phil’s Ammu-Nation is playing on a television. To give a hard rock edge to the commercial, it is accompanied by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ classic 1981 song “I Love Rock ‘N Roll.” But when we cut to the helicopter scene after the commercial, “Hot Together” is right back in the spotlight.

This trailer situates its music securely in the mid-1980s with half of the songs dating to 1986-87, as well as a few outliers (the Zenglen song is from 2004). It’s an interesting mix of specificity and ambiguity. Like how the trailer feels set in Miami, but it’s actually fictional Vice City, the music feels culturally set in the mid-1980s, but it is clear from the technology that we’re actually in current times.

Compared to most of the film trailers we analyze on this blog, the biggest difference with this trailer is that the licensed pop songs are used unedited, without the conventional remixing heard in most trailers that insert orchestral elements, big drums, isolated vocals, and frequent dramatic cuts to silence.

The trailer is also a great case study of using pop songs first to establish the sound world that the characters within the story are hearing (the first four songs are diegetic), and then using other pop songs to provide continuity accompanying an extended montage.

Grand Theft Auto VI comes out on May 26, 2026.

— Jack Hui Litster