RAGE Engine Makes GTA 6 Look Like a Real-Life Phone Video in Viral Clip

Casual phone footage of customized cars rolling past Ocean Drive recently made the rounds on the internet but if you do a double take, you'd see that the video isn't from Miami at all but taken with an in-game camera in Grand Theft Auto VI. It didn't come from an official trailer either but Rockstar Games was more than happy to share it themselves on their Instagram account.

The clip originally came from Only in Dade, a verified Miami-Dade account that normally posts real local street videos, with the caption "Miami is officially a simulation. #OnlyinViceCity."

The account says the footage is 100 percent gameplay, shot in the slightly shaky style of a phone video from a passing car. For a page built on real Miami content, posting GTA VI as if it were another day on the strip was the entire point.

The post went even more viral because of this side-by-side comparison posted to r/GTA6, lining up the in-game clip against real-life footage of the same cars on the same street. Under Instagram compression, plenty of viewers could not tell which was which. Again, Rockstar did not put out a press release. So, for all intents and purposes, this isn't official footage. However, it did like the original Only in Dade post and shared it to its official Instagram Stories, the quietest possible way to say yes, this is our game and this is not AI generated.

This is the RAGE engine doing exactly what Rockstar built it to do. Technical director Rob Nelson has explained that GTA VI was engineered to still look good in 2035, a decade after launch, which means the fidelity lives in the art, the lighting and the density of Leonida. The Only in Dade clip is the proof of concept. It's a recreated stretch of Vice City held up as a real phone video.

The release is also timely. When we broke down GTA VI on PS5 Pro, the takeaway was the PS5 Pro buys a cleaner, crispier image but the game would most likely still look the same in the eyes of most people. Although unconfirmed, we reckon this clip was captured on the base hardware most players will own, just like the first and second trailer, yet it still fooled people. We do not yet have proof the game looks dramatically better on a $900 PS5 Pro and we have plenty that it already looks unreal on a standard console.

The clip is the latest move in a marketing run that keeps blurring the lines between Miami and Leonida. Rockstar put real West Coast Customs builds on Miami streets, the Clevelander is throwing a Vice City launch party and the Miami Heat are playing a Night in Vice City. The Only in Dade video flips the direction, taking the real city into the game instead of the game into the city.

Did Rockstar stage the real cars in Miami and then recreated them in the game, or the other way around, an elaborate loop designed to blur the line on purpose? We aren't at liberty to say either way, though it is the kind of thing Rockstar would never explain. The appeal is the uncertainty.

Seven days out, Rockstar does not need a new trailer to sell the look. It just needs a real Miami account to post its game as the city itself and let everyone argue about what is real.

To be honest, these types of intimate looks at Leonida sell GTA VI better than any spec sheet.

True to that, it's already breaking records and has become the most pre-sold game ever surpassing Cyberpunk 2077, which launched on the PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with a couple of days to spare until November 19.