GTA 6 trailer 1 hit YouTube 14 hours 53 minutes ahead of time
The first GTA 6 trailer went up on December 4, 2023, a day before the slot Rockstar Games had booked for it. The YouTube timestamp reads 3:07:10 p.m. Pacific, which puts it 14 hours 53 minutes early.
GTA6 LIFE
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 |
The reason is on the record. 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. That post drew 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 being questioned by an officer called Stefanie. Her male partner is in the footage but stays anonymous until trailer 2 in May 2025, which finally 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”. It also credits a co-writer almost nobody quotes, Michael W. Campbell, better known as 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. On the door of the liquor store robbed in the final seconds, IGN spotted a “Petty Forever” sticker, number 95 in its count. The tracks picked out of the later trailers are gathered in our soundtrack guide.
The counters, and a claim that keeps coming back
YouTube reported 93 million views in 24 hours on the Rockstar Games channel alone. The most-viewed non-music video over that window was a MrBeast upload. Polygon put its fall at 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.
In November 2025 several outlets called it the most-viewed trailer in YouTube history. Numerama published a correction and turned it on itself: the 2012 Subway Surfers trailer sat at roughly 361 million views against roughly 269 million, a total inflated by its placement in Google Play, where every autoplay counts as a view. The full set of figures for both trailers is in our record tracker.
