Grassrivers is the wetland region in Grand Theft Auto VI's state of Leonida, a fictionalised analogue to the Florida Everglades. Rockstar Games has explicitly highlighted Grassrivers as one of the "must-see destinations across the sunshine state" on the official VI website (Rockstar Games, 2025), and the second official trailer features a brief but defining shot of an airboat skimming across saw-grass marsh at high speed, fan-cage churning behind a sun-bleached driver. The airboat is the iconic vehicle of swamp culture, and its inclusion in the Trailer 2 marketing rollout signals that Grassrivers is intended to be a fully simulated biome with its own transportation, economy, and subcultural identity, rather than a decorative backdrop.
The airboat sequence in Trailer 2 lasts only a few seconds but carries significant world-building weight. It depicts a flat-bottomed boat with an elevated driver's perch, the signature aluminium safety cage enclosing an aircraft-style propeller, and a long international-orange flag whipping above the mast — the latter being a real-world Florida statutory requirement designed to increase visibility in low-lying terrain and reduce collisions in dense marsh (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, 2018, cited in Wikipedia, 2024). The vegetation is unmistakably saw-grass prairie with hammocks of cypress and slash pine in the distance, mirroring the Everglades "river of grass" that gave Grassrivers its name. Wading birds scatter from the prop-wash, hinting at the dynamic ecology Rockstar has built into the region.
The airboat itself was invented in 1905 by Alexander Graham Bell in Nova Scotia, who built the catamaran-style Ugly Duckling to test aircraft engines (Kirk, 2011). However, the vessel became culturally synonymous with the American South only in the 1930s, when Florida Gladesmen independently re-invented it as a hunting and survival tool. Frog-hunter Johnny Lamb built a 75-horsepower "whooshmobile" in 1933, and Chokoloskee brothers Ernest and Willard Yates assembled their own airboat in 1935, steered by reins attached to a crude wooden rudder (Anderson, 2010). The flat hull and above-water propulsion allowed Gladesmen to penetrate saw-grass shallows that no other watercraft could navigate, opening the Everglades to commercial frogging, alligator hunting, plume harvesting, and eventually moonshining.
By December 2017, Florida alone registered 12,164 airboats, 1,025 of which were commercial tour operations (Gomes, 2017). Airboating has since become both an ecotourism cornerstone — typical tours run 60 to 90 minutes at speeds up to 60 mph, with operators pointing out alligators, anhingas, and roseate spoonbills — and a flashpoint in Indigenous and environmental politics, with Miccosukee and Seminole communities operating their own tours on tribal land. The vessels were also instrumental in the Cajun Navy's volunteer rescues during Hurricane Katrina (2005), Harvey (2017), and Florence (2018), evacuating over 1,100 patients from New Orleans hospitals in 36 hours (Dummett, 2006). This dual identity — redneck-leisure spectacle and emergency lifeline — informs the texture Rockstar appears to be importing.
The Grassrivers airboat is positioned to be more than a vehicle: it is a cultural signifier tying Jason and Lucia's storyline to Brian Heder's "golden age of smuggling" backstory (Rockstar Games, 2025), where airboats historically moved contraband through routes inaccessible to Coast Guard cutters. Expect missions involving alligator-poaching subcultures, swamp-shack meth labs, ecotourism shakedowns, and hurricane-response chaos — all rooted in documentable Florida airboat heritage.
Anderson, L. (2010) 'Talking airboats: can you hear me now?', The Gainesville Sun, 21 October. Available at: http://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20101021/News/604166724/GS/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Dummett, R. (2006) 'Rescue on the Chattahoochee', Fire Engineering, 159(1), January.
Gomes, I.V. (2017) 'Florida airboat accidents have killed seven and injured dozens in recent years', Miami New Times, 12 December. Available at: http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/floridas-unregulated-airboat-industry-9903095 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Kirk, D. (2011) 'Airboats simplify swampland surveillance', Charlotte County Florida Weekly, 17 February.
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2024) Airboat. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airboat (Accessed: 14 May 2026).