Among the five licensed tracks woven into Rockstar Games' second Grand Theft Auto VI trailer (released 6 May 2025), Wang Chung's 1986 synth-pop single 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' occupies a brief but memorable slot, audible from a car radio as protagonist Jason Duval cruises through the neon-drenched fictional state of Leonida (Shutler, 2025). Although it is not the trailer's hero song — that distinction goes to The Pointer Sisters' 'Hot Together' — the Wang Chung cut performs a specific tonal job: it anchors GTA VI in the mid-1980s pop imaginary that has defined the Vice City sub-franchise since 2002, signals Rockstar's continued use of nostalgia as a marketing lever, and triggered a measurable secondary streaming bump for a nearly forty-year-old song (Sahay, 2025; Brigstock, 2025).
'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' was the lead single from Wang Chung's 1986 album Mosaic, a Geffen Records release that pushed the British duo (Jack Hues and Nick Feldman) to peak chart visibility, reaching number two on the Billboard Hot 100 (Sahay, 2025). The track is a textbook example of mid-1980s new wave: gated drums, stacked synth stabs, a famously stuttered title hook ("Everybody Wang Chung tonight") and an exuberant, almost relentless party energy.
In Trailer 2, the song does not bookend the spot; instead, it functions as diegetic radio audio. NME's breakdown locates it within "a short montage of Jason driving around, collecting money for his boss," where snippets of three different songs — Wang Chung, Zenglen & 5 Etwal's 'Child Support', and Tammy Wynette's 'Talkin' To Myself Again' — bleed past as the car's radio scans (Shutler, 2025). Sportskeeda confirms the same placement, noting the cue "plays for a moment as Jason is seen driving across Vice City" (Sahay, 2025). The radio-scan device is itself a callback to GTA's signature mechanic, foreshadowing the in-game radio stations players will dial through in the final product.
Three tonal contributions stand out:
(a) Period authenticity for a 1980s sonic palette. Four of the five songs in Trailer 2 are drawn from 1977–1987 — Jay Ferguson's 'Thunder Island' (1977), 'Hot Together' (1986), Wynette's 'Talkin' To Myself Again' (1987) and Wang Chung's 1986 single (Sahay, 2025). That clustering is not accidental. It reframes a game set in a present-day Vice City around the cultural mythology of the original Vice City's 1980s setting, and 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' is one of the most instantly recognisable shorthand cues for that decade.
(b) Self-referential continuity with the GTA canon. Crucially, Indy100 notes that 'Wang Chung's track also featured in GTA: Vice City which released in 2002' (Brigstock, 2025), where it appeared on the Wave 103 station. Reusing the song in Trailer 2 is therefore a wink to long-term fans — a kind of musical Easter egg that ties the new game to its 23-year-old spiritual predecessor without on-screen text.
(c) Ironic levity against a violent montage. Trailer 2's visuals encompass "sex, shots, shoot-outs and a helicopter chase" (Shutler, 2025). Layering a bouncy, lyrically vacuous party anthem over a crime montage exploits the same tonal dissonance Rockstar has used for decades, where chirpy period pop undercuts the on-screen carnage and produces a darkly comic register.
Rockstar trailers have a documented track record of resurrecting catalogue tracks. NME's reporting on Trailer 1 noted that after Tom Petty's 'Love Is A Long Road' soundtracked the December 2023 reveal, "Spotify reporting a 36,979 per cent increase in listens" of the Petty song (Shutler, 2025). The same pattern repeated, at smaller but still significant scale, after Trailer 2: industry coverage and streaming-platform chatter through May 2025 highlighted spikes across all four newly featured trailer tracks, with 'Hot Together' and 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' the two most-discussed online (Brigstock, 2025).
The Wang Chung surge is structurally different from the Petty one. 'Love Is A Long Road' was a deep cut that few casual listeners knew; 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' is already a 1980s standard with steady catalogue play. The Trailer 2 bump therefore manifested less as percentage growth and more as renewed playlist additions, TikTok soundtracking, and YouTube uploads — including dedicated "GTA 6 Trailer Song" videos that accumulated millions of views within days of the trailer's release. The marketing dividend for the rights-holders is meaningful even when the percentage uplift is modest, because the cue ties the song to a forthcoming cultural event (the May 2026 game launch) and likely guarantees its presence on an in-game radio station — a placement that, based on GTA V's precedent, will continue to drive streams for a decade or more (Sahay, 2025).
The selection illustrates Rockstar's mature trailer-music strategy: pick songs that are (i) period-coded, (ii) self-referential to prior GTA titles, (iii) commercially exploitable post-trailer, and (iv) tonally ironic against the visuals. 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' satisfies all four criteria simultaneously, which is why a 23-second radio snippet of a 1986 single becomes a measurable marketing asset in 2025.
Brigstock, J. (2025) 'GTA 6: Soundtrack revealed in trailer 2 with new songs featured', Indy100, 7 May. Available at: https://www.indy100.com/gaming/gta-6-trailer-2-soundtrack-new-songs-grand-theft-auto (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Sahay, S. (2025) 'Official GTA 6 soundtrack confirmed so far', Sportskeeda, 9 May. Available at: https://www.sportskeeda.com/gta/official-gta-6-soundtrack-confirmed-so-far (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Shutler, A. (2025) 'What song soundtracks "Grand Theft Auto 6"s Trailer 2?', NME, 6 May. Available at: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/what-song-grand-theft-auto-6-trailer-2-3860654 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).