There are whispers on the wind that a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 will be out this week. There were whispers it would be last week, too. Whenever the next look at Rockstar’s open world crime-’em-up arrives, it’s unlikely it will have the cultural impact of Grand Theft Auto 4’s second trailer.
Not even Rockstar had an inkling of what GTA 4’s trailers would kick off. In part because it’s got nothing to do with Niko Bellic, his cousin, or even bowling.
Although GTA 4 was originally announced at E3 2006 by Microsoft’s Peter Moore, who rolled up his sleeve to reveal a temporary tattoo of the game’s logo, we didn’t actually get any footage of the game until the following March. The reveal trailer, titled ‘Things Will Be Different’, was filled with tracking shots of Liberty City, showing its streets swarming with cars and people hurrying at a timelapse-induced pace. Heavily inspired by the cinematography of director Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisquatsi, the characterless, dialogueless film showing the impact of humans on earth, Rockstar even used the most famous track from Philip Glass’s score, ‘Pruit Igoe’.
Maybe it’s just because of the age I was at the time when the trailer came out but it cemented itself in my mind as a pivotal moment for games. I’d never seen a game trailer quite like it and it shifted the tone of the GTA series from chaotic fun to something more deliberate and contemplative. I mean, I was also a pretentious film studies student who only discovered Koyaanisquatsi and Philip Glass as a result of that trailer, so I may be inflating its importance in retrospect.
Though, there is some evidence to back up that it was a big deal. After all, as people flooded onto their servers to watch the GTA 4 reveal trailer, Rockstar’s website crashed. That first day saw tonnes of users ripping the video and rehosting it on other sites, giving us unlucky latecomers who kept getting timeout errors on rockstargames.com a chance to watch (and rewatch) Niko’s introduction to the world.
But, that’s not the moment of cultural impact I’m referring to. No, that came with the second trailer. Go on, refresh your memory if you have to. I’ll wait.
Wait, wait, wait, don’t hate me. I’m trying to make a self-satisfied and smug point! You see on May 15th 2007, six weeks after the reveal trailer, a thread on 4chan appeared with a link to the second GTA 4 trailer. Posted by nineteen-year-old Shawn Cotter, it linked to the video of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. It is the first recorded instance of Rickrolling.
The actual second trailer wouldn’t be released until June 28th, which gave the people at 4chan a further six weeks of Rickrolling each other and cementing the meme in their community. From there it spilled out onto the rest of the internet and there’s no putting that toothpaste back in its tube.
So, measuring significance, then. GTA 4 was a momentous game for Rockstar. It marked a change for the studio and the series. The games became more narratively ambitious and they more effectively drew from film, be it avant garde movies like Koyaanisquatsi or building missions around the bank heist scene in Heat. And, yes, GTA 6 is a behemoth that is currently overshadowing the industry. Games are rushing to release before it, scattering to get out of its way in November, and sending its parent company’s stock price swinging wildly up and down whenever there’s a hint it might get delayed. Yet, there is something so pure about the spread of the Rickroll that I won’t dismiss. If a GTA 6 trailer appears this week or the next or whenever, it will dominate the gaming sites, an analysis of it will likely appear in the Gaming section of The Guardian, there might be a segment about it on BBC radio, it will be the talk of Reddit for a while, but most of the world will move on.
Whatever happens, it is unlikely to spawn a meme that is being used in 20 years’ time by people who have never even played GTA.
(Sorry if you’ve heard this story before. I mentioned it in our editorial meeting on Friday and neither Edwin nor Mark had heard it, so I thought it might be good to share this little slice of history. You can have a proper link to the second GTA 4 trailer now, you’ve earned a listen of the Boggs’ Arm in Arm (Shy Child Remix).)
