GTA 6: Every Nod to Older GTA Games Hidden in the Trailers

GTA 6 hasn't launched yet, but its two trailers are already a scavenger hunt through 25 years of GTA history. Rockstar has spent both trailers quietly rebuilding Vice City's old landmarks, reviving characters fans thought were gone for good, and dusting off brands that have followed the series since the PS2 era. None of this is a leak or a datamine - every nod below comes straight from the officially released trailers, confirmed by outlets who have frame-by-frame picked them apart.

The essentials:

• Vice City itself is the biggest callback: the whole game returns to the setting of Vice City (2002) and Vice City Stories (2006).
• Phil Cassidy, the one-armed gun dealer from Vice City, appears to be back in business - with both arms intact.
• The Ocean View Hotel and Vice City International Airport (formerly "Escobar International" in the original game) both reappear.
• The Haitians, Vice City's classic rival gang, are shown getting arrested in Trailer 2.
• Long-running series brands - Patriot, Weazel News, Sessanta Nove, Go Postal, Pisswasser - all return with updated 2026 branding.

Vice City is the easter egg

Setting the game in Vice City is, on its own, the largest reference in GTA 6. Rockstar hasn't sent the series back to this specific map since Vice City Stories in 2006, and the studio has clearly used the twenty-year gap to plant callbacks all over the city rather than starting from a blank slate.

The Ocean View Hotel is one of the clearest examples - the same building Tommy Vercetti holed up in in 2002 shows up again, rendered in current-gen detail. Trailer footage also shows a building with a distinctive rectangular gap through its middle floors, matching a location used in a motorcycle jump mission from the original Vice City. Rockstar didn't need to keep either building; putting them back in is a direct wink at players who spent time in the 2002 version of this city.

The airport gets the same treatment. In the original Vice City, it was called Escobar International, a not-so-subtle Miami drug-lore joke. GTA 6's trailers show it rebranded as Vice City International - a more sanitized name, but unmistakably the same location, now scaled up for a modern open world.

Phil Cassidy is back in business

Few callbacks land harder than Phil Cassidy's. He first showed up in GTA III running a boat shop, moved into gun dealing in Vice City, and lost an arm to a shark along the way - a running gag the series never let him live down through Vice City Stories. In GTA 6's second trailer, Jason watches a TV commercial for "Phil's Ammu-Nation," fronted by a gun-store owner who looks exactly like an older Phil Cassidy.

The twist: the guy in the commercial has both arms. Whether that's a new character deliberately designed to look like Phil, an actual returning Phil with a prosthetic, or just a knowing joke about how much time has passed, Rockstar hasn't said. Either way, it's the clearest piece of evidence yet that GTA 6 treats its Vice City as a continuation of the original, not a total reboot.

The Haitians never left Little Havana

Vice City's gang war between the Cuban and Haitian factions was a backbone of the original game's story. Trailer 2 shows a wall painted in the Haitian flag's colors, red and blue, with a police sweep arresting members of a Haitian-affiliated gang nearby. It's a small beat, but it confirms that the Cuban-Haitian tension that defined 1980s Vice City has carried into the modern-day version of the state of Leonida, more than 40 years later in the game's own timeline.

Cars that refuse to change eras

The Cheetah has appeared in every mainline GTA game since GTA III, and its design has always tracked the series' current setting. In GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, it borrowed its silhouette from a Ferrari Testarossa. In GTA IV and GTA V, it shifted to an Enzo-style shape to match the more modern eras those games portrayed. GTA 6's trailers show the Cheetah reverting to its boxier, Testarossa-inspired look - an odd choice for a game set in the present day, and one that reads as a deliberate throwback to the car's 3D-era roots rather than a strict timeline update.

The Liberator monster truck, a San Andreas and GTA V staple, also turns up in a mudding event shown in the trailers, suggesting Rockstar is carrying over some of the rural, off-road side content that defined those games' countryside areas.

The brand universe keeps expanding

GTA games have shared one fictional advertising universe since the PS2 days, and GTA 6 leans into it instead of replacing it. Patriot beer, first seen in GTA IV and carried into GTA V, returns with an updated can design. Weazel News, the series' long-running parody of partisan cable news, is back on screens in the trailers. Sessanta Nove, GTA V's Louis Vuitton pastiche fashion label, and Go Postal, the postal service with the "Collect Yourself" tagline, both reappear essentially unchanged.

Beer brands get the most fan attention: Pisswasser and Logger, both from GTA V, are shown with new spinoff variants - an alcohol-free "Pisswasser Nein" and a low-alcohol "Logger Light Dreich" - a small joke about 2026-era wellness trends layered onto a decade-old in-game brand.

There's also a subtler nod for series veterans: a character is shown wearing a "Righteous Slaughter: Blood Ops" shirt, referencing Righteous Slaughter 7, the video game obsession of Jimmy De Santa in GTA V. It's not a location or a character, just a franchise inside the franchise, still running new sequels a decade later.

A soundtrack choice that does the work quietly

Trailer 1's use of Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" isn't a plot-level reference, but it functions as one. The song's late-80s rock sound ties directly into the era Vice City originally depicted, even though GTA 6 itself is set in the present day. It's the kind of easter egg that works on longtime fans without needing a single frame of matching visuals.

What might still be waiting at launch

Trailer footage of Jason lifting weights and other characters doing gym routines has fueled speculation that GTA 6 could bring back San Andreas-style stat systems - the RPG-lite mechanics where a character's strength, stamina and even appearance shifted based on what the player did. Rockstar hasn't confirmed anything of the sort, and this stays firmly in "what we'd expect based on the footage" territory rather than a confirmed feature.

Given how much of Vice City's original geography and cast of brands has already resurfaced across two trailers, it would be surprising if launch day didn't bring more of these callbacks - deeper cuts for players who remember the PS2 and Xbox 360 eras of the series, hidden in a game most of GTA 6's audience will be playing for the first time.

For more on what's confirmed so far, see our breakdowns of every small detail fans have spotted in the trailers, the cult GTA secrets that could return, and whether the Mount Chiliad mystery is coming back. For background on the setting itself, read our guide to Vice City and the state of Leonida. If you want the full history of what these callbacks are drawing from, our complete GTA V easter eggs guide covers every secret from the previous game.