Sony appears to have an exclusive marketing campaign with Rockstar Games for Grand Theft Auto 6. We don’t know what the terms of the deal were, but it has afforded the PlayStation maker all sorts of opportunities to announce things like “GTA 6 will play best on PS5.” The game is obviously also coming to Xbox, but Microsoft isn’t allowed to talk about that in its blog posts, so it stuffed an Xbox Series X inside of an alligator instead.
“Measuring more than five feet from snout to tail, the console sits inside a meticulously crafted alligator, visible through an illuminated Xbox Nexus in its body,” the company announced today. “A custom Xbox Wireless Controller with bite marks rests between its jaws, complete with Xbox-green irises and Nexus-inspired pupils, making the Xbox Series X-BITE ready to play some of the biggest games of the year. The result is part-Xbox Series X, part-creature fabrication.”
The ’80s-style synth-backed teaser for the limited edition Xbox makes the GTA-ness of it all clear despite never mentioning the game:
The X-Bite isn’t being mass produced. The animatronic produced by John Nolan Studio, which has produced similar creatures for shows like The Witcher and movies like Jurassic World Dominion, is completely one-of-a-kind. The only way to obtain it is to win one of the special sweepstakes Xbox still loves doing.
So why pull this stunt? Why put an illuminated Xbox power-on button inside the spiny scales of a five-foot gator? I suppose it was one Xbox marketing person’s clever workaround for the GTA 6 marketing exclusivity deal. “This November, Xbox is heading to Florida,” the blog post reads. Why is Xbox heading to Florida? The post never says. The words “Grand Theft Auto 6,” “Rockstar Games,” and “Vice City” are nowhere to be found.
“Reminds me of companies that want to advertise around the Super Bowl but don’t pay up so they have to say ‘The Big Game,’” wrote Giant Bomb cofounder Jeff Gerstmann on Bluesky. “‘Hey, if you’re going to sit down and play Big Florida Crime 6 this month, do it on a gator!’”
GTA 6 will likely play the same on Xbox Series X as it does on PS5, as 99 percent of multiplatform games have this console generation. Even from the inside of an animatronic gator.