GTA VI lands on the cover of LOVE Magazine with four new Jason and Lucia screenshots

GTA VI has ended up on the cover of a fashion magazine. LOVE, the British fashion and culture title, puts Jason and Lucia on the front of Issue 27, out October 5. Rockstar made the cover art, and the magazine showed it on October 2 on its Instagram along with four new images from the game.

What happened

The four screenshots are about the couple more than the action:

• Jason and Lucia facing each other across a diner booth, each holding a pistol. GameSpot and plenty of fans read it as a nod to the opening of Pulp Fiction.
• The two of them at a pool table under red light.
• Lucia carrying a travel bag while Jason sits on a motorcycle.
• A black and white shot, him seated, her standing beside him.

LOVE also shared excerpts from the interview. The people talking are Rob Nelson, co-studio head and head of development at Rockstar North; Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative; and writers Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern and Alexa D'Agostino.

What's confirmed

Most of what's out so far is about the leads. Lucia had to be someone who wants a better life and won't let obstacles stop her getting it. Gauvey-Kern says the team wanted both protagonists to be "vulnerable, tough, flawed, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, able to learn from each other". D'Agostino talks about writing fully realised people who come out "perfectly imperfect", clichés included, but "undeniably real".

Humphries goes after the bigger theme. Maybe the American dream is more modest now, he says: a house for your family and your loans paid off rather than wild success, with Miami and southern Florida on the front line. On tone, he's blunt. If you're going to build a version of today's world, it has to be more over the top, "otherwise, you could just go outside and live in the real world."

Nelson gives the design line. Sometimes realism helps immersion, and sometimes you drop it because something else works better for the player.

What we can't say yet

The full interview isn't out until October 5, so these are excerpts the magazine picked. KeenGamer says the print issue costs €25 through KD Presse and early pre-orders sold out. We haven't been able to check that.

There's also an interview that won't happen. GQ writer Sam White said on October 3 that his planned profile of Sam Houser, Rockstar's president and co-founder, has fallen through. He'd been talking to the studio for four years, Rockstar confirmed it in April, and in the past few weeks it changed "mostly for personal reasons", as reported by Rockstar Intel. Neither Rockstar nor Houser has commented, so we're treating it as a report.

Why it matters

Rockstar is taking this campaign well outside gaming press: a fashion magazine, the Miami Heat in Vice City kits, the Game Informer cover story. LOVE also gives us something Rockstar rarely does, which is the writers talking instead of only executives, and mostly about the couple. We'll update this when the full issue lands on Monday.