GTA 6 is sexy but we still can’t see the kissing

There’s one cut in the new Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer that you’ve probably seen in a thousand movie trailers before. Two beautiful people are presented in extreme close-up. The lights are low. The music is pulsing. Their faces are close. They angle their heads and lean in closer. Their lips part and… cut!

It’s a marketing technique that’s almost as old as romantic movies themselves. Build up the heat and leave us wanting more. Delay the gratification of the kiss and all it stands for — romance and sex, emotional and physical resolution — until you’ve sold the tickets.

But there’s another reason Rockstar might have chosen to demurely cut away: kissing in video games nearly always looks dumb. Game developers can make skin glow, they can make hair toss, they can capture light refracting in a character’s eyes, or a furrow of doubt creasing a brow. But they can’t yet make lips smoosh together in a way that looks remotely convincing, let alone alluring.

Take a recent example of a game in which kissing is a super important activity: Baldur’s Gate 3. Developer Larian Studios is to be applauded for putting some post-release effort into bespoke kissing animations for different characters and different levels of intensity and tenderness. With everything we’ve invested in these characters, their kisses can still be touching moments. But they still look like two mannequins clonking their immovable plastic faces on each other. Nobody really wants to watch video game character models kiss, do they?

There remains a possibility that Rockstar has in fact solved the Video Game Kissing Problem, and chose to cut away from Jason and Lucia’s smooch in the trailer as an old-school marketing tease. If anyone can do it, it’s probably these masters of cinematic presentation and messy humanity in video games. It would be a feather in the cap of Rockstar’s animation and graphics departments; the idea of a team that has spent a quarter-century pushing the technological boundaries of macho mayhem dedicating its energies to finally nailing kissing is a sweetly appealing one.

It would also be consistent with what we see in the rest of the trailer. GTA has had sex in it before, but it certainly hasn’t been this sexy. The trailer opens with the Leonida sun gleaming on Jason’s sweaty, muscular torso. Another signature shot shows Lucia’s hips swinging in a gold micro dress. Their hands touch. They slow-dance. He strokes her midriff. She jumps into his arms. It’s hot, and even romantic.

GTA games used to be to be about a bunch of men doing man things while some women in bikinis stood around in the background and posed on the cover art. This is different. There’s real, human heat here. But if it looks awful when they kiss, will it matter?

I guess we’ll find out on May 26, 2026. Because Rockstar sure as hell isn’t going to show us before.