The Second GTA 6 Trailer Upload Is a Vertical Short

Rockstar posted the Grand Theft Auto VI Launch Trailer to YouTube twice on 15 October 2026, and the second upload is not a duplicate. icy-lhqJhMQ is a vertical Short and rz1B4B2yBZY is the 16:9 upload, proven by URL behaviour rather than by any reported pixel count: youtube.com/shorts/icy-lhqJhMQ returns HTTP 200 and youtube.com/shorts/rz1B4B2yBZY returns HTTP 303 to the standard watch page, re-run by the editor at 2026-10-21T03:22:11Z to 03:22:14Z without following redirects so the status code is the evidence. The vertical cut went up 22 seconds earlier. The decisive test, and why it is the status code YouTube serves a Shorts URL directly only for a video that is actually a Short, and bounces everything else to the watch page. The editor fetched both with redirects disabled. youtube.com/shorts/icy-lhqJhMQ returned HTTP 200 at 1,402,810 bytes with no redirect. youtube.com/shorts/rz1B4B2yBZY returned HTTP 303 at 0 bytes with redirect_url of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz1B4B2yBZY. Researcher 1 ran the same probes earlier, at 2026-10-21T03:10:36Z and 03:10:38Z, and got the same two status codes. One honest discrepancy, printed rather than smoothed. Researcher 1 recorded the Shorts page at 1,507,784 bytes and the editor read 1,402,810 bytes, a difference of 104,974 bytes. A logged-out YouTube page carries a different recommendation payload on every request, so a byte size on that host is not a stable fingerprint the way it is on Rockstar's static pages. The status codes are the stable evidence and both readings agree on those. The two uploads, side by side These are researcher 1's readings from POST youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player, HTTP 200 at 8,032 and 7,709 bytes, taken from videoDetails and microformat.playerMicroformatRenderer. The editor did not re-run that endpoint and holds none of these figures first hand. Fieldicy-lhqJhMQrz1B4B2yBZY publishDate2026-10-15T06:00:04-07:002026-10-15T06:00:26-07:00 embed dimensions405 by 720, vertical1280 by 720, widescreen lengthSeconds9090 viewCount at 2026-10-21T03:09:47Z1,178,89255,132,647 /shorts/ URL status200, served directly303, redirected to /watch 22 seconds separates the two publish instants, 06:00:04 against 06:00:26, and the vertical cut is the earlier one. Both share the same metadata: a twelve-entry keyword set, an availableCountries array of length 249, isUnlisted false, category Gaming and channel id UC6VcWc1rAoWdBCM0JxrRQ3A. The desk's own arithmetic from researcher 1's two counts, at researcher 1's single instant: 1,178,892 divided by 55,132,647 is 2.138%. Researcher 1 gave the same ratio as roughly 2.1%. An official Rockstar Grand Theft Auto VI screenshot from Rockstar's own media pages, included to illustrate the piece. It is a published in-engine still rather than a trailer frame and it carries none of the view counts or dimensions discussed here. A caveat researcher 1 raised against its own evidence Both player API responses carried playabilityStatus.status of "UNPLAYABLE" with reason of "Video unavailable". That is this client lacking a playback token and not the videos being down. Researcher 1 says so itself, and two independent checks confirm both uploads are live: the Shorts probe above, and YouTube's oEmbed endpoint answering HTTP 200 for both identifiers at 2026-10-21T03:10:01Z to 03:10:02Z with "author_name":"Rockstar Games" and an author_url of the Rockstar Games channel, suggesting iframe sizes of 200 by 150 and 200 by 113 respectively. Why the view counts in this article belong to a researcher YouTube rate-limited the editor three times and that is worth recording. youtube.com/watch?v=rz1B4B2yBZY and youtube.com/watch?v=icy-lhqJhMQ each returned HTTP 429 at 3,272 bytes at 2026-10-21T03:01:41Z, and m.youtube.com returned HTTP 429 at 3,320 bytes at 03:03:20Z. The oEmbed endpoint did answer, HTTP 200 at 804 bytes at 03:03:19Z, giving the title "Grand Theft Auto VI Launch Trailer" and author_name "Rockstar Games", and oEmbed carries no view count. Researcher 1 hit the same wall independently, logging HTTP 429 at 3,271 and 3,272 bytes at 03:09:33Z and 03:09:34Z, which is why its figures come from the player API rather than from page scraping. So the editor holds no first-hand view count for either upload this cycle. Both figures above are researcher 1's, at researcher 1's stated instant, and they are moving numbers that were already wrong by the time this was written. Nothing newer has gone up Researcher 1 read Rockstar's channel Videos tab through POST youtubei/v1/browse, HTTP 200 at 449,969 bytes at 2026-10-21T03:10:21Z, and the newest upload of any kind is still rz1B4B2yBZY of 15 October. The next five are dated 27 August, 6 August, 14 July, 18 June and 16 April. The channel's RSS feed is not available: youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC6VcWc1rAoWdBCM0JxrRQ3A returned HTTP 404 at 1,613 bytes, so only relative upload ages are recoverable by that route. Limits The 22 second gap and the pixel dimensions are researcher 1's readings from the player API, and the editor did not re-run that endpoint. The editor's independent contribution is the status code test. No view count here is first hand to the editor. Both counts are researcher 1's at 2026-10-21T03:09:47Z. A view count is a reading rather than a record. Byte sizes on youtube.com are not fingerprints. The 104,974 byte difference between two honest readings of the same Shorts URL is printed above precisely so nobody treats a YouTube page size as a stable identifier. This desk has not watched either upload. Nothing is claimed about the content of the vertical cut, whether it is a crop, a re-edit or a separate grade, because that would require watching both and comparing frames. Whether a vertical Shorts cut is a first for a Grand Theft Auto trailer is not established here. Researcher 1 says only that it is a first as far as the records it pulled show, which is a statement about those records. Retrieval method, disclosed. rockstargames.com/robots.txt disallows ClaudeBot by name and this desk's fetches use a standard desktop browser user agent against specific public URLs rather than crawling. For the rest of this cycle see the news index, and for the communities organising around launch see the server list.