A GTA 6 clip is going viral because people think it's real life footage

So Push Square's got a piece up about this clip that's been bouncing around social media all week. The hook is simple: people are watching it and genuinely can't tell it's from the game. It's fooling folks into thinking it's real footage, and that's the whole reason it's spreading.

I've seen the same thing happen with every Rockstar release since RDR2, so I'm not shocked. Still, there's something about Leonida's lighting that seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The article doesn't get into specifics about what's actually in the clip, so I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I know exactly what shot everyone's losing it over.

why this keeps happening

Rockstar's always been the studio people point at when they want to argue games look like movies now. And with the November 19 date basically here, every scrap of footage is getting frame-by-frame scrutiny from a community that's been waiting over a decade. Of course a good-looking clip goes nuclear.

What I find funny is the reaction itself. Half the replies are people impressed, the other half are convinced it's touched up or cherry-picked. That's just where we're at with this game. Nobody trusts anything until they've got the controller in their hands.

It's the #OnlyinViceCity tag doing the rounds again, which tells you everything about how Rockstar's marketing this thing.

I'll say this much. If the game actually looks like that in motion on a base PS5, the 30fps conversation is gonna feel pretty silly in hindsight. We already know ray tracing is a PS5 Pro thing, so the interesting question is how close the standard console version gets to whatever's in this clip.

Not long now either way. Pre-loads are done, the game's gone gold, and we're basically counting hours at this point. I'm more curious whether the clip holds up once we're all actually playing instead of watching compressed video on our phones.

Anyone else think the whole "is it real" debate is gonna die off completely once people get their hands on it, or are we gonna be doing this again with GTA 7?

---

Source: Push Square · Curated content.