Here's the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer perfectly recreated in Minecraft

A Youtube channel specialising in Minecraft animations has produced an incredible recreation of the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer using Minecraft assets and Unreal Engine 5. Boranium Art, run by the Miami-based Ray Escobar and three collaborators, cut its teeth with an almost equally impressive recreation of the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer a year ago (and also has a thing for Oppenheimer-via-Minecraft), but this raises the bar and then some.

Not only does this recreate the trailer shot-for-shot, but easily the most impressive aspect of it is how it captures the tonal aesthetic of Rockstar's Vice City: the neon-flecked nights, the breathtaking sun-kissed sweeps, and the grimy urban sheen. The eagle-eyed Minecrafters will spot it uses the Minecraft Story mode style for the characters, and several GTA elements have been swapped-out for Minecraft in-jokes.

But given this is the year of our lord 2024, perhaps the first important clarification is this: «It's not AI,» says Escobar. He says they've been planning the video for around a year, and it was a «no-brainer» to «bridge one of the best-selling video games ever with another future best-selling one». The production took around one-and-a-half months and four people worked on it: Escobar as main animator, an assistant animator, and two builders.

«All the assets were first built in the actual Minecraft game,» explains Escobar. «Only exactly what is shown in the video is actually built, to save time. Once the builds are finished, they are then exported from the Minecraft world using an awesome piece of software called 'Mineways.' After that, they are imported into Unreal Engine 5, where I sometimes spend hours lighting and re-lighting till I match or closely approximate the lighting of the original. The characters are, however, animated in Autodesk Maya, not UE5.»

I ask which of the in-jokes is a personal favourite. «My favorite moment is probably the Alligator being replaced with a Drowned mob,» says Escobar, «and