Fans find alleged GTA 6 tease in a GTA Online trailer, but what does it mean?

GTA 5
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

A GTA 6 teaser may have been hidden in a recent trailer for GTA Online, according to speculation from fans online.

The alleged nod to GTA 6 was spotted in a brief video that Rockstar Games put out before officially announcing the new GTA Online Cayo Perico Heist. The video seems to show night-vision drone footage of the massive compound which players will raid with their favorite crew or - for the first time - on their own. At the bottom of the footage are longitude and latitude coordinates, which seems like a typical sort of thing for a stealthy recon drone to keep track of.

It looks like there may be more to the coordinates than flavor. Rather than pointing to the middle of the ocean or an uninhabited island somewhere, as you'd expect GPS coordinates for a fake drug lord's fake island to do, they point to a remote spot in northwest Virginia. The coordinates zero in on a switchback in the Middle Mountain Trail that looks an awful lot like a "VI".

Rockstar Games has used Roman numerals for its flagship series ever since GTA 3, so naturally folks are speculating that this is "VI" as in GTA 6. There are plenty of "VI" shaped things across the entire Earth, so why did Rockstar pick this one in particular? Could Grand Theft Auto be headed to Virginia (or a fictionalized version thereof) in its next installment? GTA's never gone to the South before - unless you count Vice City, but Florida's really its own thing.

This could all just be a coincidence, of course. Or even if somebody at Rockstar did do it on purpose, it might have just been a video editor having a laugh with a tiny detail they knew would pass unnoticed by all but the most hardcore fans. Rockstar's parent company is keeping the GTA 6 web domain renewed, as if you needed proof that it was still a possibility for the future.

Reports from earlier this year suggest GTA 6 is still very early in development, and that it may launch smaller and then be expanded.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.