The wanted system

GTA 6's wanted level carries more than stars: under them sit icons — two figures, a clothes hanger, a face and a car — that read as what the police know about you. The scale runs to six, and it is drawn in full during ordinary play.

At 14:13 in the Extended Look the top-right corner carries the six-position star scale with four lit and, below it, four small red icons: two figures side by side, a clothes hanger, a single face, and a car. Below those sits the ammunition counter, 28 and 250 in this frame, and under that the silhouette of the weapon in hand. The icons are drawn a little smaller than the stars and sit in the same block, which is how you can tell they belong to the wanted system and not to something else on screen.

At 16:16 the same corner is different: four of the six stars are lit red, and there are three icons instead of four — the two figures, the hanger, the face. The car is gone. It is already gone at 15:57, where no weapon wheel is open either; this page used to say the wheel was. At 15:49 it is still in the row, with a dark saloon on the road in front of the camera; at 15:57 a saloon of the same shape stands in a covered car park with its door open. We hold no frame between the two and none that shows that car on fire, so what took the icon away the frames do not say. Until 27 September 2026 this page tied it to the getaway car being set alight earlier in the video; with the icon still in the row at 15:49, the frames do not carry that link.

That is the whole argument, and it rests on frames rather than on anything Rockstar said. The reading they support is that each icon is a piece of description the police are holding, and that one icon can go while the others and the level stay; what takes it away they do not show. The other half, the screen where a mask or an outfit is switched on, is not in any frame we hold; see masks and disguises for what came out of that page.

One claim on this page was wrong and the re-read round caught it. It used to say that outside the weapon wheel only the lit stars are drawn, so a four-star level looks like four stars, and that the full scale of six shows only inside the wheel. It does not. Three ordinary gameplay frames with no wheel open all draw the whole six-position scale: at 14:00.07 four are white, at 16:16.60 four are red, and at 18:05.72 the four on the left are drawn see-through, as unlit positions are, while the two on the right carry the white outline of a lit star and are dark inside. So six is what the meter shows in normal play as well, which makes the scale better attested than it was, on four frames instead of one.

Read that way, the four frames agree on which end the meter fills from: in every one the marked stars sit to the right and the unlit ones to the left. Until 27 September 2026 this page read the four stars on the left at 18:05.72 as filled and had the meter disagreeing with itself; the building behind them shows through, which is how unlit positions are drawn. Why the two on the right are dark inside, one still cannot say. A meter that flashes would explain it.

The 14:00.07 frame carries the rest of the display too: the numerals 40 and 300 in a heavy outlined face above the silhouette of a carbine with a carry handle and a straight box magazine. Those read as a magazine and a reserve, and the same layout at 14:13 shows 28 and 250 with the same carbine, a magazine part-spent.

How to recognise it

• Four red icons under the stars at 14:13: two figures, a clothes hanger, a face, a car
• Three icons at 16:16: the car icon is gone
• A scale of six star positions, drawn in full in ordinary play and marked from the right: four lit at 14:00, 14:13 and 16:16, two at 18:05
• The icons sit in the same block as the stars, a little smaller
• Ammunition as two numbers above a weapon silhouette: 40 and 300 at 14:00, 28 and 250 at 14:13

The frame it comes from

The frame is Extended Look at 14:00.07. It is 3840 by 2160, and the subject occupies 825 by 291 of it. Also in it: the Vice City skyline, a black Benefactor sport sedan, Vicebeach police pickup, a dark flatbed truck, and a shooter leaning out of a window.

How this was measured

These figures come from the dataset, not from the prose above. We measure everything and claim what counts. How we work

What we still do not know

• What takes an icon away: at 16:16 the car icon is gone with four stars still lit, so one can go without the level dropping, but none of the frames we have shows why
• What the two-figure icon means — your accomplice, or witnesses
• Why the two stars at 18:05.72 are dark inside their outlines: a flashing meter would explain it
• Whether six is the maximum, or the widest we happen to have seen