Rockstar Games has officially revealed the cover for Grand Theft Auto 6, and the very first thing I did when I saw it was check to see if it had a helicopter in the top left corner of the artwork. And yup, it does. It’s nice to see Rockstar continuing this tradition that it has (mostly) stuck to for 25 years.
On June 18, Rockstar announced that GTA 6 pre-orders would go live across console storefronts and retailers on June 25. The company didn’t release a new trailer alongside this announcement, but it did reveal the game’s official cover, which you can see below:
And right there in the top left is a helicopter, as I hoped. Rockstar is continuing a little Easter egg or design quirk it has maintained on almost every GTA cover since 2001.
As I’ve documented before, since the release of Grand Theft Auto III on the PS2, Rockstar has been including a helicopter of some kind in the top left portion of all of its GTA covers, with a few weird exceptions.
Technically, the international versions of GTA 3‘s cover didn’t include a helicopter in that spot, but that cover also didn’t use the now-iconic grid layout with various images. So who cares about that ugly cover! GTA Advance on the GBA also didn’t include the heli, but its cover was just the GTA logo on a boring grey background, so once again, who cares about that ugly cover!
There is one grid-based GTA game cover that doesn’t include a helicopter in the top left corner. Can you guess it? Well, guess fast because the answer is about to be revealed at the start of the next sentence that follows this one. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. That’s the one time Rockstar didn’t include the heli.
Some might say it’s because you couldn’t pilot helicopters in GTA: Chinatown Wars, which launched on the Nintendo DS and PSP back in 2009, but that’s not a good explanation. You couldn’t pilot helis in Grand Theft Auto 3, but it included one on the cover. Maybe Rockstar forgot? Or maybe they just wanted to see what a GTA cover would look like without a heli. I hate it.
I’m so happy that the helicopter is back for GTA 6‘s cover art. It’s like a little nod to the past and a comforting constant in these wild times. No matter what, I can always count on the heli in the top left of a new GTA game. And maybe a motorcycle in the top right corner, though that’s a more obscure, lesser-known pattern that Rockstar follows less frequently. Feel free to break out that info and impress…someone. Possibly.