Rockstar didn’t forget how to make a gameplay trailer. It decided the game wouldn’t fit inside one.
That, at least, is the gist of what Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson has said about why Grand Theft Auto 6 got the Extended Look treatment instead of the narrated gameplay reveal everyone had penciled in.
It’s a little strange to realize the Extended Look is already a few weeks old. The Netflix premiere alone made it an odd one, and the whole approach was a departure for a studio that usually reveals on its own terms, in its own format.
Thirteen years of doing it the other way
Go back to the run-up to GTA 5 and you get the template: a narrated gameplay trailer, tightly cut, the kind of thing people have been getting nostalgic about for the 13 years since the game launched. Rockstar ran the same play for Red Dead Redemption 2.
So the assumption was obvious. Two for two, why not three.
It didn’t happen, and Nelson’s explanation is that showing GTA 6 off is “extremely tough.”
The comment surfaced on a podcast, not in a press release
Twitter user videotech pointed out where it came from. Kinda Funny’s Andy Cortez was one of the few people invited to preview GTA 6 and talk to Nelson directly, and in Kinda Funny’s video preview of the game, Cortez relayed what Nelson told him.
That preview went up a few weeks ago. It’s only just resurfaced.
Worth keeping straight: this is a secondhand account from a hands-on preview, not a statement Rockstar has put out under its own name. Nelson’s reasoning reaches you through Cortez, which is a different thing from a company blog post, even if it’s about as close to the source as anyone outside the studio gets right now.
The last time Rockstar walked you through a Grand Theft Auto with a narrator and a cut of curated gameplay, it was 2013. This time you got a Netflix premiere and a co-studio head telling a podcaster the game is “extremely tough” to show off.
