After breaking records on Twitter and YouTube, we have to ask: why are we all so obsessed with the second GTA 6 trailer?

As pretty much everyone even vaguely interested in video games surely knows by now, there was a new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer released earlier this week. While that trailer has already broken records, standing firm as the biggest video launch on YouTube ever, it’s also had a massive impact on the music front. Namely, the accompanying song, which saw a 182,000% boost on Spotify.

This all begs the question: why is the world so invested in this new trailer? Obvious point first, it’s a new trailer for the most anticipated game right now. It may be the most anticipated game we’ve seen since Cyberpunk 2077, for a sequel to the biggest video game series of all time no less. The fact the trailer has broken all these records isn’t particularly surprising, especially when you consider just how many people have bought and played Grand Theft Auto 5 over the years.

In my head there are two major reasons why this new trailer has gone wild, though. The first is Rockstar’s ability to not overplay its hand. It knows it’s holding aces, the world knows it’s holding aces. R* doesn’t need to sprinkle out teasers, trickles of gameplay tidbits or little breadcrumbs to remind people that GTA6 exists. Everyone and their mum knows GTA6 is real and coming.

Rockstar dropped that original trailer back in December 2023, and since then has left people to ruminate on it. They let folks scour the trailer down to the bone, taking in all the landmarks, all the references to pop culture. Every car a tease, every model a potential character. They let people build the mythology around GTA6 themselves, passionate flames that didn’t even need fanning.

What other companies would have done is bring developers out to elaborate on what was shown in that first trailer, but Rockstar doesn’t need to do that. Such is the privileged position it has built itself with GTA5. Unaddressed hype can prove a dagger sharpened at both ends for games, but in GTA6’s case people can already kind of guess what the bones of the gameplay experience will be like. What’s left is to fill in the gaps, and no amount of marketing spend or peeling back the curtain can beat that magic. The only issue is that GTA6 ends up disappointing folks who’ve set expectations so high, which, c’mon.

The second major reason for the trailer’s absurd popularity is Grand Theft Auto 6’s unique position in the video game industry itself. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly a video game enthusiast, meaning someone who cares enough about games to be willing to read about ’em. Being the well-read and intellectual gamer that you surely are, you’ll know that GTA6 has been this iceberg of sorts throughout the year. Everyone knows that when it comes out, it’ll swallow up the month it’s in. Everyone knows that all eyes are on GTA6, and that almost everyone even vaguely enticed by open world shenanigans will be playing it.

That energy is tangible, and it’s spread far beyond the walls of the typical video game bubble. You could have argued that Baldur’s Gate 3 had a similar electricity buzzing around it when it launched into Version 1.0, but the waiter in town probably wouldn’t have heard about it. Maybe the cool lady in the bookshop did, her sister at the tabletop store certainly did. Helldivers 2 broke out of the cage and into the general populace a bit more with its incredible launch, winning over the normals. I had a TSA Agent ask about it last year. Usually they only ask about Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty, or, well, GTA5.

If Helldivers snapped off a bar and squeezed out of that cage of seperating the video game scene and wider popular culture, GTA6 will shatter it into a thousand pieces. You could argue it already has. My mum, a nurse in her 50s, knew the game had been delayed. She heard it on the regional British radio. That is mental. No one on the ward knows that Borderlands 4 had its release date moved forward, and that game will probably be one of the biggest hits this year.

When you consider this absurd level of prominence GTA6 has in not only the minds of the gaming enthusiasts, but also the casual gamers, and ultra-casual normal people who might not even own a console or PC capable of gaming, it’s no secret at all why the second trailer has drawn in so much interest. If you imagine every video game trailer you watch on YouTube as an advertisement you’d watch in a cinema, usually the kinds of people sitting beside you in the theatre are likeminded gamers. For GTA6, the person sitting next to you could very well be Jonathan Smith, age 68, retired investment banker.

GTA6’s second trailer, and its ridiculous performance, is no shock at all. It’s a once in blue moon kind of thing, we probably won’t see another game trailer do so well until GTA7 or a mythical curveball like Fortnite 2 (or Half-life 3…) gets revealed. You, I, and untold millions are excited for a new video game. When you consider the full scale of it, you can understand the obsession.