No pressure with GTA 6 Rockstar, but GTA 4 and GTA 5 had two of the best reveal trailers of all time

(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

The GTA 6 trailer is coming, and all I can think about is Niko Bellic and Michael De Santa. More specifically, while I'm as optimistic about seeing the next mainline Grand Theft Auto game in action come "early December" as the next person, Rockstar's recent announcement immediately transported me back in time.

Both the GTA 4 and GTA 5 reveal trailers were groundbreaking in their own ways. Visually, they may not look quite as pretty against today's cutting edge standards, but they do still hold their own – especially given they're (somehow) now a respective 17 and 12 years old. In cinematic terms, however, they remain unsurpassed. Both of these games' reveal trailers were darker, moodier, more wistful and more melancholic than anything that'd come before; breaking from the garish, whimsical shorts of the day that, for me, defined video game promotion at the time.

Not that these games weren't under pressure to deliver in their respective eras, but the long and short of it is they did, and now there's surely even more expectation weighing on the shoulders of GTA 6 at this stage. It's been over 10 years since the series' last mainline entry, for example, and the turbulence levied by those catastrophic in-development leaks of September 2022 cannot be underplayed. Rockstar will inevitably throw everything it has at the GTA 6 trailer come early December – but an extra layer of pressure comes from just how great its predecessors' reveal trailers were, and still are to this day.

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"Life is complicated," said a solemn Niko Bellic, the protagonist of GTA 4, after its debut trailer showed us glimpses of Liberty City's most popular NYC-aping tourist spots. "I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different."

Aired in March, 2007, the GTA 4 reveal trailer was a different beast. It was our first look at the Grand Theft Auto HD universe (following GTA 3, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas' 3D universe outings), and posed a real-life mirroring metropolis that had its own versions of the Empire State Building (the Rotterdam Tower), the Statue of Liberty (the Statue of Happiness), Times Square (Star Junction) and much more.

I first saw the so-called 'Things Will be Different' GTA 4 reveal trailer on TV when I was still playing GTA: Vice City Stories on the PSP. Albeit the most refined of the 3D universe's cartoonish art style, the difference between what I was playing and what I was watching was night and day. Having cut my teeth on the Atari ST and the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, I was well aware of new console generations heralding better visuals, but for whatever reason I didn't expect this from GTA, certainly not so soon. This was like something from the movies, and it set my hype for a Grand Theft Auto game in the PS3 and Xbox 360 cycle into overdrive. Straight up, things were definitely going to be different here as per Niko Bellic's hopeful assertion.

"Speeding car chases, hostile bank raids, burning wreckage, jet fighter planes tearing through the clouds towards an orange sun dancing over a pointed skyline"

Fast forward four-and–a-half years to the GTA 5 reveal trailer. Between times, GTA 4 had been and gone, as had its two slices of story DLC. Red Dead Redemption had lassoed our western crime sim hearts in 2010, and L.A. Noire was still storming the charts following its May 2011 launch. Come November 2 that same year – one week after the developer's innocuous five-character tweet that simply read, "#GTA5" – Rockstar introduced us to Michael De Santa, one of GTA 5's three interchangeable protagonists. We saw glimpses of the sunkissed and ever-hedonistic Los Angeles-aping Los Santos and Blaine County sprawl, and then we saw a lot of crime.

Speeding car chases, hostile bank raids, burning wreckage, jet fighter planes tearing through the clouds towards an orange sun dancing over a pointed skyline – it all looked lush, and, once again, whet the appetite for the next Grand Theft Auto venture that promised the world and was ready to deliver it. To the rhythmic flow of English rock band Small Faces, the strings and drums took us on a journey that was almost within reach, and it was glorious.

Little did any of us know at the time, this GTA reveal trailer would be the last (re-releases aside) for well over a decade. Like any form of media that captures your heart and inspires your imagination, I can happily rewatch both of these promo shorts and be immediately reminded of how good it felt watching them for the very first time all those years ago. I'm now 37 years old, and, without trying to sound overly romantic or profound, the older I get the more I appreciate these moments. I was 20 when I first laid eyes on Liberty City in early 2007, and I was 25 when Michael De Santa first spoke to us about relocating his family to Los Santos.

Who knows how old I'll be when the next GTA reveal trailer after this one comes around, but I'm pretty sure the GTA 6 reveal trailer in early December will by then have earned its spot in the conversation alongside its predecessors. So, yeah, no pressure Rockstar. You've set your own bar pretty high.

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Joe Donnelly is a sports editor from Glasgow and former features editor at GamesRadar+. A mental health advocate, Joe has written about video games and mental health for The Guardian, New Statesman, VICE, PC Gamer and many more, and believes the interactive nature of video games makes them uniquely placed to educate and inform. His book Checkpoint considers the complex intersections of video games and mental health, and was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2021. As familiar with the streets of Los Santos as he is the west of Scotland, Joe can often be found living his best and worst lives in GTA Online and its PC role-playing scene.