A Quiet Portfolio Post That Blew Up
A former Rockstar Games animator has unexpectedly become the latest center of attention for Grand Theft Auto fans, all because of a simple portfolio upload. The developer, who has worked at Rockstar for over two decades on major titles like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, posted a demo reel of their work to Vimeo. It was meant to showcase animation skills for future employers. Instead, it turned into the latest source of speculation about Grand Theft Auto 6.
The reel includes a mix of finished scenes from past Rockstar games and some stylized Pixar style character work. However, GTA fans locked onto the opening 20 seconds. Those short clips appear to show early work in progress animations from Grand Theft Auto 6 itself, and they spread rapidly after being spotted and shared on Reddit.
The original Vimeo upload was quickly deleted, including a description that reportedly confirmed the footage was from GTA 6, but as is usually the case with leaks, the clips are now mirrored and easily findable online.
What The New GTA 6 Animations Show
The eye catching part of the reel is a set of three flat textured animations set to Tom Petty’s Love is a Long Road. That song features in the first official GTA 6 trailer, which immediately made fans pay closer attention to what was on screen.
The clips are clearly not final game footage. They look like early test animations, with simple textures and limited detail. Even so, they give a small look at how Rockstar is building everyday movement and interaction in its next open world.
The first animation shows a male character using what appears to be a rental bike. He walks up to a bike rack, removes a bicycle that looks like GTA 6’s version of a Lime style rental bike, rides or walks with it, then returns it to the rack. Fans had already spotted similar racks in the first GTA 6 trailer, along with branding that might be for a fictional company called Lombike. This new animation backs up the idea that rentable bikes will be part of Vice City’s modern urban life, just like real world mobility apps.
The other two animations focus on a character who closely resembles Lucia, one of GTA 6’s two main protagonists. In the first of these, she climbs down from the bed of a truck to the ground. In the second, she hops down from the truck roof to the truck bed, and then down to the street. Background buildings are visible but basic, reinforcing that this is test content rather than polished gameplay.
Even in rough form, these clips hint that Rockstar is putting extra effort into vehicle and rooftop movement. Previous GTA entries have featured missions where you cling to or move across vehicle roofs, but they were often stiff or limited. The new animations suggest more natural climbing and jumping as you move between different heights like roof, truck bed, and ground. For players, that could mean more fluid traversal and more cinematic set pieces.
It is important to remember that this is early work. The animation quality, texture detail, and even some of the exact movement patterns may change before release. Still, for PC and console gamers hungry for any hint of how GTA 6 actually plays, this is a rare look at the game’s under the hood development process.
Leaks, Lawyers And The Long Wait For GTA 6
The situation is awkward for the animator involved. This was clearly intended as a professional portfolio, not a big leak or marketing move. Given Rockstar’s and parent company Take Two’s long history of aggressively protecting their intellectual property, there is understandable concern about how their legal team will respond.
This is not the first time GTA 6 has slipped out early. Back in 2022 a huge leak exposed a large amount of early gameplay, tools, and footage from internal builds. That incident showed very raw versions of the game, with placeholder assets and debug information, but it also confirmed core details like the modern Vice City setting and dual protagonists Jason and Lucia. The new animation reel looks like it might even predate some of that material in terms of polish.
Officially, Rockstar has only released two full GTA 6 trailers so far. Both have been widely praised for their style and detail, packing in environmental storytelling, background NPC behavior, and plenty of hints at the chaos players can cause. They also arrived alongside frustrating news: multiple delays.
The current plan is for Grand Theft Auto 6 to launch in November 2026. Rockstar has said the extra months will allow the team to finish the game with the level of polish players expect. For PC players in particular, that polish matters, since the series has a history of arriving later on PC but benefiting from performance improvements, higher resolutions, and more advanced graphics options when it finally lands.
From a hardware and performance perspective, every new glimpse of the game reinforces that GTA 6 is being built as a long term showcase title. The dense crowds, highly animated characters, and complex vehicle interactions that fans have spotted so far suggest that both console and eventual PC versions will lean heavily on modern CPUs and GPUs. Smooth city traversal, realistic physics, and fluid animation systems all rely on strong processing power under the hood.
For now, though, everything outside the official trailers remains speculation and work in progress. Portfolio clips like these are snapshots taken in the middle of development, not promises of the final product. Still, they are fascinating for anyone who cares about how open world giants like Grand Theft Auto are actually built. They show the small building blocks that eventually become the big blockbuster moments we remember.
Until Rockstar is ready to talk more, GTA fans and PC gamers will keep dissecting every frame of footage, both official and leaked, while they wait for that 2026 release window to finally arrive.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/grand-theft-auto/rockstar-animator-posts-unseen-gta-6-clips-in-demo-footage-which-is-immediately-nuked-but-the-internet-just-does-not-forget/
