GTA 6 trailer 1 hit YouTube 14 hours 53 minutes early

The first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI went online on December 4, 2023, a day before the moment Rockstar Games had picked for it. The upload timestamp YouTube shows on “Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1” reads 3:07:10 p.m. Pacific. The appointment was for the next morning.

Marker	Date and time
Slot announced on December 1, 2023	December 5, 9 a.m. in New York (3 p.m. in Paris)
YouTube upload timestamp	December 4, 3:07:10 p.m. Pacific
The same moment in New York	December 4, 6:07 p.m.
The same moment in UTC	December 4, 11:07 p.m.
Gap	14 hours 53 minutes

Less than 24 hours before the booked slot, an X account since suspended put the trailer online, and the studio answered by publishing its own version on its YouTube channel, Ash Parrish reported for The Verge on December 4, 2023.

The build-up had started a month earlier. On November 8, 2023, a Rockstar Newswire message signed by Sam Houser promised a first trailer for early December, timed to the studio’s 25th anniversary. On December 1, Rockstar posted an image on X carrying a date and a time, with no game name on it: 1.8 million likes in 24 hours, according to Video Games Chronicle.

The video runs 90 seconds. It names one protagonist, Lucia, seen in a Leonida Department of Correction uniform, questioned by an officer called Stefanie. Her male partner is in the footage but stays anonymous until trailer 2 in May 2025, which spells out both full names, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos. The closing card reads “Coming 2025”. No platform appears on screen: it took the press release that followed to attach PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S to the date, with nothing said about PC.

The official description credits “Love Is A Long Road” by Tom Petty, from the 1989 album “Full Moon Fever”, co-written by Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers. Streams of the song rose by nearly 37,000 percent on Spotify afterwards, and it reached second place on the global iTunes chart behind Mariah Carey, The New York Times wrote on December 8, 2023.

Rockstar declined to explain the pick to The New York Times at the time. Rob Nelson, head of development at Rockstar Games, gave the reason nearly three years later, in the interview TroisCouleurs published on August 27, 2026.

With the first trailer for this game, the Tom Petty song [Love is a Long Road] was a real sort of mission statement. You don’t have the game fully formed, you have an idea of what it’s going to be, but you really have to push hard to pull that together.

The track came before the finished game, and Nelson treats that order as routine at Rockstar: “often it is a song we rally around,” he says of the stage where a project takes shape. He does not say when “Love Is a Long Road” was picked, or who picked it.

YouTube reported 93 million views in 24 hours on the Rockstar Games channel alone, a start Polygon put past the MrBeast record in 13 hours. Guinness World Records ratified the new mark, along with most-liked game trailer, at 8.9 million likes on day one. As of August 28, 2026, the page shows 291,981,122 views and 12,462,408 likes.