After the release of yesterday’s GTA 6 trailer, I became someone I’ve never been before. I was feverish, hungry—I was ticking through the footage frame by frame, drinking in as much detail as possible. Unlike the countless frenzied YouTubers and Reddit theorycrafters, however, I wasn’t trying to divine anything about GTA 6’s story or gameplay. I was answering a higher calling, pursuing a greater aesthetic purpose.
I was looking at all the fake logos, because I think they’re neat.
This isn’t a bit. I’ve always been fascinated with minute environmental details. For years I’ve had a regular practice of firing up empty private lobbies just so I could comb Halo and Call of Duty maps for the small creative decisions environmental artists might’ve made that are easy to miss when you’re actively being murdered.
When you focus so closely on those granular choices—the placement of furniture nobody will ever sit in, the arrangement of bookshelves that’ll become a mess as soon as the first grenade goes off—you can appreciate the artistry in crafting a digital environment. And there’s no granular detail I love like some good fictional branding.
The only good brand is a fake one. I’m a sicko for logos for pretend companies, seals for governmental organizations that don’t exist, and packaging for imaginary snack products. There’s a beauty to me in the knowledge that the Destiny 2 artists who crafted the look for the Tex Mechanica gun foundry had to think through what brand identity would make sense for space cowboy guns in a world where it’s been thousands of years since anyone’s actually known what a cowboy was. Fictional branding is the kind of hyperspecific consideration that helps a space and setting feel unique—and makes it sting when someone shoves a Darth Vader costume in there.
In a game with a production budget like GTA 6, though, that aesthetic appreciation gives way to an almost existential awe. I’m fascinated by its density of fake beer brand signage and perfectly crappy billboard ads in the same way I’m fascinated by James Cameron making one of the best-selling movies of all time just because he really wanted to look at the Titanic. It’s arresting. It’s uncanny. It’s an obsessive aesthetic emanation of money moving around at an unfathomable scale.
The new GTA 6 trailer first sent me into weirdo mode about 43 seconds in. As Jason walks through a convenience store with a six pack of Patriot beer, it wasn’t the packaged bundles of Zesta brand soda or the abused Leonida lottery kiosk that grabbed my attention. It wasn’t even the bodega cat on the right. It was the door.
As someone enters the store, the glass door swings inward, revealing a set of pretend stickers showing the pretend logos of the four pretend credit card brands the pretend gas station accepts. Nearby, another sticker shows GTA’s own spin on a tap-to-pay symbol. And for good measure, there’s an ad for Redwood cigarettes, and the obligatory disclaimer that the store IDs for every alcohol purchase.
That’s more than a half-dozen bespoke bits of branding and signage on a visual space that the majority of players will, at most, glance at momentarily. Somebody had to design those. Somebody else had to approve them. And every moment it took was money that was deemed necessary and appropriate and important to spend.
The trailer’s two minutes and 46 seconds are stuffed with fictional marina t-shirts, fictional fridge magnets, fictional bumper stickers. When we see a harborside bar at 1:30, I made a sound with my real human mouth that was somewhere between delighted and scandalized. It’s draped with pennants, neon logos, vintage wooden signage, state license plates, snack bags, booze bottles, beer cans.
Does it suck that some of those beers are named “Piswasser” and “Pindayho”? Yes, but I’m mesmerized nonetheless.
I’m sure GTA 6 will play pretty good. I bet the cars will be fast and the crime will be fun. But I want to look at the bar—to see what’s produced when someone’s allowed to spend an unprecedented fortune to create a completely imaginary bar that’s like a normal bar, but maybe a little sillier.
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