Who is GTA 6’s male protagonist, and why do players think they’ve already figured out Rockstar’s big twist?

GTA 6’s trailer gave us plenty of hints about the game. Aside from taking clear inspiration from real-life Florida, the trailer is full of music and scenes fueling fan theories about GTA 6’s plot and protagonists. The same thing happened with GTA 4 and GTA 5, so it’s not surprising to see it happening again.

Fans have several theories about the main characters in GTA 6, Lucia and Jason, but the trailer makes a few important things crystal-clear. The first is that Lucia is the one in charge: She’s the first character to appear in the trailer, and her name is the first thing you hear. The second is that Jason is her romantic partner. The rest is up for debate, and since the trailer only shows around a minute and a half of footage, there’s lots of room to theorize.

One fascinating fan theory focuses on Jason, with a potential plot twist the likes of which we’ve never seen before in Grand Theft Auto.

Jason is an undercover cop

Speculation about Jason’s role in the story began rolling in on every corner of the internet after the GTA 6 trailer dropped. Many fans noticed that Jason seemed nervous every time he appeared, while Lucia was comfortable, even when the cops were chasing them.

Jason’s nervousness suggests he might be hiding something from Lucia, and the most probable theory is that Jason is an undercover cop—or at least he used to be. This would be a first in the GTA franchise, bringing a whole new dynamic to the game.

The GTA games have never showed us the perspective of a police officer before, especially not one of the main characters. The closest we have is Victor Vance from GTA: Vice City Stories and the antagonist Frank Tenpenny from GTA: San Andreas.

Jason is the one being betrayed

The undercover cop theory isn’t fully approved by the internet’s “theory dad” Matthew Patrick, otherwise known as MatPat, from the Game Theorists YouTube channel. In a video analyzing the GTA6 trailer, MatPat discusses evidence from the trailer that he believes suggests Lucia will be the who betrays Jason.

His theory is mainly based on the State Seal of Leonidas, the fictional state in which GTA 6 will take place. The seal shows a woman wearing a red dress, who MatPat says represents Lucia, and a man wearing white clothes, representing Jason. The woman is looking at the horizon while the man is being attacked by an alligator.

Next to them is a snake hanging from a tree, which MatPat says represents the police, while tying the image to biblical “Adam and Eve” mythology where Eve listens to the snake looking for knowledge. In the same way, MatPat suggests Lucia will make a deal with the police looking for a way out of prison.

Other games with police protagonists

It could make sense for Rockstar to relate the first female lead in modern GTA to the first woman in Christian mythology. But it would also be interesting to have an undercover cop as one of the main characters, innovating the franchise beyond just adding a female protagonist, even though it has been done before by other games.

Sleeping Dogs is one of the best games featuring an undercover cop as the protagonist, but with fewer guns than GTA. Wei Shen has to climb the criminal ladder to infiltrate the Chinese mafia while also dealing with problems from the past, all with an incredible open-world map and interesting characters.

The True Crime franchise is often compared to GTA, but from the law-enforcers’ perspective. It’s an action-adventure open-world game with similar gameplay to GTA, and also follows an Asian-American protagonist, Detective Nicholas Kang, like Sleeping Dogs. You don’t play as an undercover cop, but you can act like a criminal in True Crime: Streets of LA and True Crime: New York City.

Here are some other games that feature undercover cops or let you play as cops:

• Driver
• Lego City Undercover
• Swat 4
• The Getaway: Black Monday
• Crackdown
• L.A. Noire