The Venture Pickup

This is how Rockstar chose to open the Extended Look: not a car chase, not a shootout, but Jason walking into a tower block to pick up a bag. Lucia drives, Jason heads into the Venture Apartments in Rockridge on a collection for Boobie Ike, and for a few minutes the game is happy to just let you soak in the building.

Rob Nelson has explained why the sequence exists at all. Rockstar’s writers design characters to bring players to map locations, and the team needed someone involved in a tower block getting raided by cops. In his words, “that sequence exists partially because somebody needed a reason to put you in that building.”

Jason asks for Raymond and a big guy escorts him up in a real-time elevator ride. The apartment turns out to be a drug lab staffed by workers in their underwear, and the package is a red bag of what the dialogue calls Booby’s bricks. The residents, Jason is told, are not huge fans of Boobie Ike.

Mid-handoff, Raymond’s phone rings. It is Ernesto, on speaker: “We got a situation happening. My friends on the task force are on their way. They said they’re paying you a visit. So, cops are coming. Just let them take whatever they want.” The cops are coming to take, not to bust, and Raymond answers the warning by reminding Ernesto he has someone sitting outside his mother’s house. Then the raid starts anyway, and Jason’s only line that matters is “I need to find a way out.”

During the escape, dialogue picks out a familiar face among the police: “It’s Mendes. You think he saw us? No, he couldn’t have.” Creators widely read the moment as Mendez recognising the pair, and as confirmation these are corrupt cops.

Plenty of systems in a short window. On an upper floor there is a dog Jason can pet, scold or study for the RDR2-style animal checklist, and petting it pings an angel icon and chime on the new criminal profile system. When the raid hits, Jason grabs the bag and a shotgun, a man gets slammed through a wall, a bank of security camera TVs shows the police moving through the building, and the gunplay plays out with a cover system and no visible auto-aim. Preview coverage confirmed the mission has multiple escape routes; the one shown ends with a stuck elevator, a detour through an old lady’s apartment and an exit out a window slightly south of the entrance.

Frames from the Extended Look opening: the tower exteriors, the elevator ride and the lab handoff.

The Big Smokes Cigar Company storefront is visible across the street, a wink at a certain San Andreas character. A shot of the raid from the police perspective matches a scene from Trailer 2. Fans think Ernesto’s voice belongs to Julián Rebolledo, who played Raul Passos in Max Payne 3, and some suspect Mendez is related to Lucia. Both are guesses.