Both Trailers Are Built Around a Deliberate Needle Drop

Rockstar has never treated trailer music as background. Since Vice City in 2002 the studio has used licensed tracks to tell you what a game feels like before it tells you what it is about, and both GTA 6 trailers follow that method exactly.

Trailer 1 is built on Tom Petty's 'Love Is a Long Road', released on Full Moon Fever's follow-up Into the Great Wide Open in 1991. It is a driving song in the most literal sense, and the trailer cuts to it as a montage of movement: cars, boats, crowds, a state seen at speed. Lucia and Jason are introduced as people already in motion, with the reasons left for later.

Trailer 2 changes the register completely. 'Hot Together' by The Pointer Sisters, from 1986, is slower, warmer and far more intimate, and the trailer built on it spends its time on faces rather than on landscape. The same state, shot as somewhere people live instead of somewhere people escape through.

Put side by side, the two picks bracket the tone Rockstar is claiming for Leonida: restless escape on one side, sweltering closeness on the other. That the 1986 track scores the second trailer is its own quiet joke, given that 1986 is the year the original Vice City is set.

What none of this confirms is anything about the soundtrack of the finished game. A trailer licence is a trailer licence, and Rockstar has not published a radio station line-up.