Rockstar released the Grand Theft Auto VI Launch Trailer on October 15, five weeks before the game comes out on November 19. It runs 90 seconds on Rockstar’s YouTube channel, set to Flower in a Hurricane, a new single from Justice, the French duo who also wrote the game’s score.
It is a mood piece, cut fast, and the police mostly flash past. We still filed nine sightings of emergency vehicles, of eight different vehicles. Most of them we knew. One belongs to a sheriff’s office we had never read on a vehicle before.
An airport chase (0:39)
The first police appear on a runway at sunset. A white pickup races under a parked airliner with a woman climbing out of its window, and red and blue lights follow it across the tarmac. The pursuing cars are too far and hazy to make out. We filed them with the white and green sedans seen since Trailer 1, but that link is a guess from the city setting, not a reading.
Two familiar units downtown (0:47 to 0:48)
A white police SUV with a round blue door emblem and a black push bar noses into an intersection as a green supercar skids past. A second later a sedan speeds down the street. This time its side is legible: POLICE on the rear fender, a round VICE CITY emblem on the door, and the number L737608.
It is the Vice City Police sedan from Trailer 2 and the Extended Look, and the clearest look at it yet. It has the squared roof and short tail of the Ford Police Interceptor Sedan, the Taurus-based car behind GTA V’s Vapid Police Interceptor.
The SUV is familiar too: it first appeared on the highway in Trailer 2. Its round blue emblem now matches the Vice City Police sedan’s, so it likely belongs to the same force. We have not read a name on the SUV itself.
The beach, under a biplane (0:56)
A biplane with a wing walker trails pink smoke along the shore. Below it, two small vehicles share the sand with the crowd. An ATV with a rider crosses behind the umbrellas, and a dark red crew cab pickup is parked by a lifeguard tower.
Neither is close enough to read. One of Rockstar’s Vice City screenshots shows a red lifeguard quad lettered OCEAN on a beach like this one, so we filed the ATV with it. The pickup we filed as a lifeguard truck on context alone, and it is labeled that way.
A night shootout (1:01 to 1:05)
For a moment, a city street at night fills with sparks. From above, Lucia fires a grenade launcher down at police vehicles as an explosion goes off among them. GamingBolt’s Ravi Sinha places her in a helicopter. Our frame shows only the dark structure around her.
Three vehicles with emergency lights are in the shot. A dark SUV has red and blue lights at the top of its rear window. A tan pickup carries a blue light bar on the cab and an armed figure standing in its bed. A third, lost in the smoke, shows only its light bar.
None of them carries a name we can read, so we filed all three as tactical units. Four seconds later, an officer stands in green light, in a vest that reads POLICE above the letters STF. No vehicle is in that frame. Rockstar has not said what STF stands for, and we will not guess.
Mariana County Sheriff (1:11 to 1:12)
The shot that matters most to us comes near the end. Two white SUVs run down a dark, wooded dirt road with their light bars on. The closer one is seen from behind. Its liftgate reads MARIANA COUNTY, with SHERIFF in large letters below, and DIAL 911 is legible on the body.
The name itself is not new. In Trailer 2, a highway sign in Port Gellhorn pointed down I-404 East toward Mariana County and Vice-Dale County. What is new is a vehicle wearing it. Until now the only sheriff’s office we could name was the Leonida County Sheriff, read on a sedan in Trailer 1.
The tall, boxy rear looks like a recent Chevrolet Tahoe police SUV. GTA V built its Sheriff SUV on the Declasse Granger, a Chevrolet Suburban lookalike, so the Tahoe would be a close relative. That is a guess until the game is out. Everything we know about the office so far is on its agency page.
What the Launch Trailer adds
The figures as a table
| Time | Sightings |
|---|---|
| 00:00.0 to 00:10.0 | 0 |
| 00:10.0 to 00:20.0 | 0 |
| 00:20.0 to 00:30.0 | 0 |
| 00:30.0 to 00:40.0 | 1 |
| 00:40.0 to 00:50.0 | 2 |
| 00:50.0 to 01:00.0 | 2 |
| 01:00.0 to 01:10.0 | 3 |
| 01:10.0 to 01:20.0 | 1 |
| 01:20.0 to 01:29.2 | 0 |
Counted from our catalog. Every sighting is listed with its timestamp on the Launch Trailer timeline.
Seven names on file. With Mariana County, the agencies we can name across all of Rockstar’s material come to seven. There are two sheriff’s offices (Leonida County and Mariana County) and three police forces (Vice City, Vicebeach and Vice-Dale), plus NOOSE and the OCEAN lifeguards.
Few new vehicles. Half of the eight vehicles were already in our catalog. The new ones are the Mariana County SUV, two tactical vehicles from the night shootout and the beach pickup.
A trailer, not a chase. The cuts are too short to say much about how the police behave in play. For that, our Extended Look piece is still the place to start.
None of these vehicles has an official in-game name yet. In five weeks the game will tell us how close our guesses were. Until then, every sighting, with its exact second, is on the Launch Trailer timeline.
