KitKat is the latest brand to ride Grand Theft Auto VI's coattails, posting a slick video of a missing chocolate truck cruising through a neon Vice City. It is a cute bit of marketing and it is also not an official deal with Rockstar Games.
The post dropped on November 10 with the line "About those missing KitKats, stay tuned." The clip plays like a Grand Theft Auto mission, a "have you seen this truck?" missing poster, a red KitKat rig rolling past palm trees and pastel buildings in full Vice City style, then a stylized shot of the truck and the words "stay tuned."
All jokes aside, the heist it's based on is actually real. In March earlier this year, roughly 12 tonnes of KitKats, about 414,000 bars, were stolen from a truck moving between a Nestlé factory in Italy and Poland just before Easter. Nestlé confirmed it was no stunt, then used the heist to their advantage by spinning it into a campaign, a "Stolen KitKat Tracker" that let people punch in a bar's batch code to check it against the stolen load. The new post gives that story a GTA VI paint job for the launch window.
KitKat is far from alone. With a launch this big, brands are falling over themselves to borrow the neon Miami look and the heist energy. Burger King, McDonald's, BMW, Hyundai and others have all posted GTA-styled content in recent weeks, none of it paid for by Rockstar. The studio keeps its list of official partners short and bars real products from inside the game, so most of this chaos is brands inviting themselves to the party.
GTA 6's official brand partners
Partner | The collaboration |
|---|---|
Selfridges | Vice City merch pop-up and the £1 million Cheetah on sale |
West Coast Customs | Built the six real-life GTA 6 cars |
Miami Heat | "A Night in Vice City" game and uniforms |
PlayStation | Limited DualSense controllers and the "plays best on PS5" campaign |
Netflix | Hosted the Extended Look premiere |
Atlantic Records | Released Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album |
Wynwood Walls | Official murals and merch |
Rockstar's official partners are a short list that KitKat is not part of.
The real deals are a different animal. Across the pond is the currently ongoing Selfridges takeover, where Rockstar and West Coast Customs built a real £1 million Grotti Cheetah you can buy for yourself. The Miami Heat's Vice City night, PlayStation, Netflix and Atlantic Records' soundtrack album fill out the rest. Rockstar picks a handful of partners and closes the door. KitKat is not one of them.
KitKat's "stay tuned" promises more is coming, probably another video or a tracker-style gimmick tied to the launch. Whether anyone outside the replies cares, it shows how far GTA VI's gravity reaches. A chocolate brand is now telling heist stories in Vice City colors and it did not need Rockstar's permission to do it.