A few days ago we told you Rockstar Games had never released a live-action trailer and we said the real-life Grand Theft Auto VI trailer fans keep predicting from the Miami car shoots would tread new ground. Apparently, we were wrong. Rockstar has made a fully live-action promo before. It just happened in 1999.
The promo was for the second Grand Theft Auto and it was a proper short film. Running around eight to ten minutes, GTA 2 - The Movie was shot live-action on the streets of New York City in 1999, with the pre-9/11 World Trade Center and the Manhattan Bridge in the background. Dan Houser himself wrote it, Alex de Rakoff directed and Jamie King produced, with the rest of the Rockstar and DMA team involved. Scott Maslen starred as Claude Speed, the game's protagonist, over a soundtrack of Moving Shadow artists.
In fact, portions of the film ran in the opening cutscene and the menus and Rockstar put the full short online to download, as QuickTime and RealVideo files. It later turned up on a Moving Shadow CD. For 1999, that was quite an ambitious piece of marketing, a live-action movie standing in for a trailer way before GTA became what it is today.
What the 1999 GTA 2 Movie was
Detail | The GTA 2 live-action short |
|---|---|
Format | A promo short film, around eight to ten minutes |
Shot in | New York City in 1999, pre-9/11 skyline included |
Written by | Dan Houser |
Directed by | Alex de Rakoff |
Produced by | Jamie King |
Starring | Scott Maslen as Claude Speed |
Soundtrack | Moving Shadow artists |
Parts of it ran in the game's intro, with the full short offered online to download.
In the twenty-five-plus years since, Rockstar has never made another one. Every major trailer since, for Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2, has used in-game footage or cinematics, sometimes mixed with music or edited like a montage, but never a standalone live-action film. The GTA 6 launch trailer is the same. The GTA 2 short is the lone exception in Rockstar's whole history.
This might change soon. Rockstar has already turned the real city into Vice City, with custom cars wearing Leonida plates, a Vice City blimp, beach branding and signage all over town. Over the past few days, fans have spotted film crews shooting those cars with reports of permits for commercial filming with sports cars on Ocean Drive. A live-action or hybrid piece using that real-world set would fit a campaign this size. It would fit a game this self-aware too, one packed with callbacks and winking references. The studio has done it once. It has never had a better excuse to do it again.
None of this makes it a lock. Modern Rockstar has stayed in-engine for a reason, the quality bar it sets with its own tools. The GTA 2 short is twenty-five years and a very different company ago with the one who wrote it no longer part of the company. However, it's hard to ignore the fact that the ingredients for another live-action promo are sitting on Ocean Drive.