Even just the trailer for GTA 6 is a landmark for gaming, hitting an obscene 60 million views on YouTube in 12 hours. Since then it’s been scrubbed through shot-by-shot by enthusiasts to try and pull out every little detail, including whether Bikini Girl is secretly Lucia or not. Personally I still think she’s Aicul, Lucia’s evil doppelgänger from the mirror dimension, but when I brought in my corkboard to the PCG office I was told to “please stop yelling while we’re all trying to work” and that I was “causing a scene”.
In a similar level of dedication to this much-anticipated game, blogger and YouTuber Andrew Levitt decided to recreate the trailer shot-by-shot (thanks, Eurogamer)—and while the results are great, the sheer amount of work pumped into the making of it is next-level.
Initially, this scans as a cute fan remake taped together with stock footage—several of the shots have been replaced with their real-life counterparts (some of whom were none too pleased by Rockstar’s inclusion back when the trailer debuted). However, every drone shot you see here was painstakingly scouted and filmed by Levitt and his friend Jake during a week-long trip to the real Miami.
A couple of scenes had to be let go, though. For example, the aforementioned Bikini Girl scene is absent despite Levitt finding the penthouse used in the trailer—to the YouTuber’s dismay a night in the apartment adjacent to the penthouse would’ve cost $4,733, and they weren’t able to get a tour otherwise. You can watch the full behind-the-scenes video below.
While Levitt and his friend aren’t the first to attempt this, with a french YouTuber CyrilMP4 doing something similar back in January, I think this is the first try I’ve seen that actually scrapes close to a faithful shot-by-shot recreation. The raw dedication is impressive—not only from Levitt’s side, but from Rockstar’s, too.
The fact that so many of these places are solidly grounded in real life means we’ll be getting a downright faithful recreation of parts of Miami, Florida—rendered as the fictional Vice City, of course. It’ll be interesting to see how the studio weaves these well-researched locations into its bizarro crime world equivalent, though we’ll have to wait until 2025 to find out, and it’ll be even longer before it comes to PC. Alas, my fated duel with Aicul will have to wait.