Was the GTA 6 Extended Look a Show of Rockstar’s Confidence or Hubris?

It is surely no accident that GTA 6 got its big gameplay debut on a platform that might be the world’s number-one way to watch movies. Rockstar’s games have always drawn deeply from cinematic language, iconography, and technique. This is the studio that made a game of The Warriors and tried to sublimate the effortless cool and hard edge of William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (or Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales) into a new medium.

GTA 6 looks perfectly at home among Netflix’s movie catalog; honestly, it outclasses a lot of it. The astonishing visual richness of the world it conjures — the bustling locations, the cast of thousands — is probably the envy of most modern filmmakers this side of Christopher Nolan (especially those working on straight-to-streaming budgets). You can see why Rockstar thought its latest project was deserving of a bigger canvas — and why the studio might have wanted to give Jason and Lucia more than three minutes. The pair might be cartoonishly hot, but they seem much more subtly drawn and generally low-key than GTA 5‘s dastardly trio.

Image: Rockstar Games

But, while Rockstar might be one of the high priests of video games’ movie worship, the studio doesn’t share in the inferiority complex that often goes hand-in-hand with it — at least not anymore. While you might be impressed by GTA 6‘s cinematic visuals, you also wouldn’t mistake it for anything other than a video game.

The Extended Look is surprisingly comfortable with showing game mechanics without signposting or commentary, and with scrambled, asynchronous cross-cutting between gameplay, cutscene, and montage. There’s no narrator giving an overview of plot points or in-game systems. Instead, you’re trusted to follow along. The story, too, seems to sprawl out in multiple directions at once, while threading the details of a bigger-picture narrative — Jason and Lucia’s relationship, whatever their “problem” is — into the stitching. That’s how storytelling in video games works!

In the Extended Look, GTA 6 looks both utterly spectacular and quite ordinary. It’s a GTA game: you steal cars, shoot people, meet disreputable characters. Rockstar isn’t seeking to redefine expectations of the biggest game franchise in the world, and why should it? But, through the way the Extended Look has been made and released, Rockstar does seem to be seeking to put GTA in a new context. The Extended Look is about scarcity (this is the first new GTA in 13 years, after all), about engineering a moment, about removing GTA from the world of video games entirely — though it doesn’t necessarily disavow that world.

Is that hubris or confidence? Both, probably, though I might call it something else: pride.