GTA 6's launch trailer finally shows how it all started for Jason and Lucia

Rockstar surprise-dropped the GTA 6 launch trailer on 15 October: 90 seconds captured on a standard PS5 that, for the first time, show how Jason and Lucia's story kicks off. The track is "Flower in a Hurricane", which sees Justice, the composers of the game's original score, team up with Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. We've gone through it shot by shot.

What happens in the GTA 6 launch trailer?

This is the first video that gets straight to the story. It opens in the Keys, with a welcome sign and Brian Heder's boatyard, Brian's Marina, where Jason is buffing the hull of a boat. In voice-over, he comes clean: he got into trouble in the Army, didn't exactly leave on good terms, and no lender will touch someone like him. Another shot shows him in a US Army T-shirt next to Lucia and a red sports car.

Then the phone rings. It's a collect call from prison: "Lucia Caminos". It neatly closes the loop with the first trailer, which opened with her behind bars, and makes it clear the story starts with her release. Later on, Lucia asks whether they're going to be okay, and the answer sums up the pair: they've always stuck together, and they'll get through this together too.

Rockstar's own description puts it like this: an easy score goes wrong and the two of them end up caught in a criminal conspiracy that stretches across the state of Leonida, on "the darkest side of the sunniest place in America".

What action scenes does it show?

The second half is pure spectacle, and almost all of it is new:

• Lucia leaps from a car onto a plane's landing gear, Mission: Impossible style.
• A helicopter smashes the load it's carrying into the glass facade of a skyscraper.
• Jason, in a suit, clings to a helicopter at night above Vice City (1:09). Everything suggests it picks up the mission we saw in the Extended Look.
• A raid on a ship: someone in tactical gear drops onto the deck from a helicopter and several men push through a flooded hold.
• Two people walk into a circular bank vault that looks a lot like the big heist.
• Lucia fires a grenade launcher at NOOSE armoured trucks with roof-mounted machine guns, so Leonida's police clearly won't hold back.
• Jason and Lucia interrogate someone alongside Raul Bautista, the veteran bank robber who acts as the couple's mentor.

And in between, Vice City at its most Vice City: a motorbike jumping off a rooftop over a train, a pickup with a guy riding on the roof racing beneath a jet, a biplane trailing pink smoke over a packed beach and a green supercar drifting past a police cruiser.

What details might you have missed?

Rockstar hides a lot in half-second shots. Early on, a green iguana crosses the road, a real pest in South Florida and one of the many animals of Leonida. At 0:31, an officer pats a police dog just before the ship raid. And there are several shower scenes with the couple, more intimate than in any previous video, in which Lucia is wearing the ankle monitor Rockstar has talked about. That said, the romance isn't mandatory: you can keep them as plain partners in crime.

The strangest shot comes at 1:01. Two armed women in balaclavas pose for a camera, with focus brackets on screen, and the one on the left is dressed exactly like Lucia at that same point in the trailer.

What song plays in the GTA 6 launch trailer?

"Flower in a Hurricane", and it's the big surprise of the video for two reasons. First, it's a brand-new track: Trailer 1 used Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" and Trailer 2 went with The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together", both existing songs. Second, it's how Rockstar revealed who is composing GTA 6's original score: Justice, the French duo behind "D.A.N.C.E.".

For the debut they've brought in an all-star line-up: Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. The song is already on streaming platforms and will feature on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, which comes out the same day as the game. We've covered everything about it in the GTA 6 album.

Why did Rockstar capture it on a standard PS5?

The video opens with the PlayStation logo and the tagline "Plays Best on PS5", alongside a PS5 Slim and a DualSense, part of the marketing deal between Sony and Rockstar. What's interesting is what it doesn't say: everything was captured in-game on a standard PS5, not the Pro. It's the best hint yet of how it will look on the console most players actually own. The Xbox Series X|S version launches the same day.

Will there be more trailers before 19 November?

Unlikely. Calling it a "launch" trailer five weeks out sounds like the last big video, and after a little over three hours on YouTube it had already passed 2.3 million views. From here on, expect short ads that reuse these scenes. Next on the calendar is the digital preload, which starts on 12 November, a week before the game unlocks. Keep track of the days left with our countdown.