Big Smoke is not coming to GTA 6, and the reason is not one thing. It is two.

He is in the wrong continuity. He is also dead. Most sites give you a shrug on this question. You can have a real answer instead, and both halves of it are checkable.

That is the boring part. The interesting part is why a fast food order from a 2004 PlayStation 2 game is still one of the most quoted lines in gaming, and why the man who says it is the most effective traitor Rockstar has ever written. Spoilers for San Andreas follow. You have had twenty two years.

Who Big Smoke is

His name is Melvin Harris. Everyone calls him Big Smoke.

He is a main character in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, released October 26, 2004, and he was voiced by Clifton Powell. Powell is a working film actor, and it shows in the performance. Smoke never sounds like a video game villain. He sounds like somebody’s uncle.

He is a high ranking member of the Grove Street Families and a childhood friend of Carl Johnson, the man you play as. When CJ comes home, Smoke is the one who hugs him.

The 1992 setup

Rockstar’s own copy for San Andreas lays out the premise cleanly. Carl Johnson left Los Santos five years earlier. His mother has been murdered, his family has come apart, and his childhood friends are heading for disaster. He comes back, and corrupt cops frame him for a homicide within minutes of him stepping off the plane.

So CJ arrives with nothing. No standing, no crew he can trust, and a police unit already using him.

Big Smoke is the one who acts like none of that is a problem. He talks about the old days. He talks about family. He talks about getting Grove Street back on top. Out of everyone CJ comes home to, Smoke is the one who seems to still believe in the thing they all grew up in.

The betrayal, and how you find out

He was working against them the whole time.

Big Smoke was allied with the Ballas, the Los Santos Vagos, the Russian mafia and Frank Tenpenny, the corrupt C.R.A.S.H. officer running CJ. While the Grove Street Families collapsed, Smoke built himself into the biggest drug dealer in Los Santos. Ryder, another one of CJ’s friends, was in on it too.

The reveal is the best scene in the game, and it works because Rockstar shows you instead of telling you.

In the mission “The Green Sabre”, Cesar takes CJ to a garage and makes him watch. Smoke and Ryder come out of a building with Ballas members and C.R.A.S.H. officers. They are all standing around a green Sabre. That car is the one used in the drive-by that killed CJ’s mother.

CJ works out what he is looking at, and it is already too late. Sweet has been lured into an ambush at Mulholland Intersection. He is shot, arrested, and ends up in a prison hospital awaiting trial. CJ surrenders, gets driven out of the city by Tenpenny and Pulaski, and is dumped in the countryside with no weapons and a camera.

Everything CJ spends the next two thirds of the game doing exists because Big Smoke said the right things for long enough.

Why the betrayal lands so hard

Here is what I think Rockstar got right, and almost nobody copies it.

Smoke’s cover is never a performance of loyalty. It is loyalty, right up to the part where it is not. He is warm in every scene. He is funny. He gives CJ advice that is actually good. When he talks about the neighbourhood he means it, or he means it enough that you cannot hear the seam.

Compare that to how most games telegraph a traitor. Cold line delivery, a lingering camera, a music cue. San Andreas does none of it. Powell plays him friendly and Rockstar lets him stay friendly, which is exactly why the garage scene works. You are not confirming a suspicion. You are losing a friend in real time.

The other thing Rockstar refuses to do is give him a noble reason. Smoke does not betray Grove Street for a cause. He does it for money and status, and when he is dying he says so. He admits he got caught up in the money and the power, then spends his last breath worrying about whether people will remember his name.

I am paraphrasing that deliberately. The exact wording of his death monologue varies between fan transcripts and I am not going to quote a line I cannot pin down. The substance is not in dispute. He dies vain.

How he dies

CJ kills him.

In the final mission, “End of the Line”, Carl fights his way into Smoke’s penthouse drug manufacturing operation and shoots him. Smoke dies next to his open safe. Tenpenny walks in afterwards and the game ends with him too, in a firetruck crash off an overpass near the Ganton Bridge, which Sweet points out was basically self inflicted.

So the character has a closed ending. No ambiguity, no missing body, no “we don’t know what became of him”. That matters for the GTA 6 question and I will come back to it.

The order

Now the part that made him famous to people who never played the game.

In the mission “Drive-Thru”, CJ, Sweet, Smoke and Ryder pull up at a Cluckin’ Bell. Smoke orders. This is the line, and it is quoted the same way across every source I checked:

I'll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda.

That is it. That is the whole joke. A man orders too much fast food in a 2004 crime game, and twenty years later it is one of the most recognisable pieces of dialogue in the medium.

Why the order became a meme and stayed one

It did not blow up in 2004. It took years, and the trail is documented.

Know Your Meme dates the earliest widely watched upload of the scene to February 16, 2010. A soundboard prank call to McDonald’s using Smoke’s voice went up on March 8, 2014 and cleared 1.5 million views. A one hour remix landed in April 2015. A music remix followed in October 2016. It hit r/copypasta on June 5, 2017, and explainer videos picked it apart that November.

So it is a slow burn, which tells you something about why it stuck. Three reasons, I think.

First, it is speakable. The order has rhythm. It is a list with a cadence, it is the right length to memorise, and it ends on a punchline you can land. That is copypasta engineering, and nobody wrote it on purpose.

Second, you can perform it in real life. People order it at drive-thrus. That gives the joke a physical world to live in, which almost no game quote gets.

Third, and this is the part I find genuinely funny, the meme completely detached from the character. Millions of people can recite Big Smoke’s order and have no idea he is the villain of the game, or that he dies in a drug lab. The line outran the story by a mile.

The other meme people credit to him

Worth clearing up, because it comes up constantly.

“Ah shit, here we go again” is not Big Smoke. That is CJ, in the opening cutscene, after Tenpenny and Pulaski dump him in Ballas territory. Know Your Meme traces its spread to a 2015 upload and a peak around April 2019.

Two separate memes, two separate speakers, same game. If you are going to quote San Andreas, get the right man.

Why GTA 6 cannot bring him back

Big Smoke is in the wrong universe. That alone settles it.

Rockstar split its own catalogue into three versions of the same fictional America, and it said so in writing. On December 15, 2011 it published a Newswire post answering fan questions about GTA III, and in it Rockstar described the "universes" are the worlds interpreted at different definitions, 2d, 3d and high definition.

Then it gave the rule that decides this whole question: we felt brands and radio / back ground characters would exist in both, but 3 dimensional characters would not.

And then the conclusion, unambiguous: so no, we don't believe any GTA3 characters could exist in the GTA4 universe.

San Andreas sits in the 3D universe, next to GTA III, Vice City, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. GTA 6 sits in the high definition universe, next to GTA IV, GTA V and GTA Online. Under Rockstar’s own stated logic, a written character does not travel between them. Brands do. Radio does. People do not.

Then there is the second reason, and it is much simpler. Smoke is dead. CJ shot him. Even inside his own continuity he is finished, which puts him in a different bracket from Tommy Vercetti, who is also ineligible but ended his game alive and on top. Tommy is fenced off. Smoke is fenced off and buried.

I am going to flag the honest limit here the same way I do everywhere else on this site. Rockstar wrote “we don’t believe”, not “never”. That was a studio answering fan mail in 2011, explaining its own creative thinking. It is the closest thing to an official canon position that exists, and it has held for two console generations, which is why I treat it as the real answer. It is still a position and not a law.

And the tidy capitalised era names you see everywhere are not Rockstar’s doing. Rockstar published two fan answers, one in September 2009 and one in December 2011. The charts, the numbered eras, the wiki buckets: that is the community’s organising work built on top of them. Anyone writing “Rockstar confirmed the HD universe” has skipped a step. The full version of this, including where the model came from, is in the GTA timeline explained.

What Rockstar’s rule does allow, and Cluckin’ Bell proves it

Do not read any of that as “nothing from San Andreas can appear”. Read the rule precisely. Rockstar drew the line at three dimensional characters, and it explicitly said brands cross.

The best example is sitting right inside the meme.

Cluckin’ Bell, the chain Big Smoke ordered from in 1992, is a working business in the high definition universe. GTA Online built a whole update around it. Rockstar released The Cluckin’ Bell Farm Raid on March 7, 2024, with its own Newswire post and a Cluckin’ Bell branded truck.

Look at what that shows you. The restaurant crossed universes. The man who ordered from it did not, and cannot. That is not me interpreting Rockstar’s rule. That is Rockstar’s rule running in production.

So for GTA 6 in Vice City, all of this would be consistent with everything Rockstar has said:

  • A Cluckin’ Bell you can drive up to, with a menu you can read
  • A radio bit, a station or a caller repeating something you recognise
  • A mural, a poster or graffiti, the same way GTA IV put remember Tommy u r still my hero on a wall and Rockstar called that wall a little joke for fans of the series
  • A number 9 on a menu board, which would be the exact size of joke Rockstar likes

Expect jokes. Do not expect people.

What Rockstar has actually said about GTA 6’s cast

Nothing about returning characters. Not one name, from any universe.

The supporting cast Rockstar has published on its official site is Cal Hampton, Boobie Ike, Dre’Quan Priest, Real Dimez, Raul Bautista and Brian Heder. All new. The protagonists are Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and the official synopsis puts them in Vice City in the middle of a criminal conspiracy across the state of Leonida. That is the story. Anybody telling you about a confirmed cameo has made it up.

Big Smoke next to Trevor Philips

The cleanest way to see how much the universe split matters is to put Smoke beside somebody in the other bucket.

Trevor Philips is from GTA 5. That makes him high definition, which makes him eligible, and Rockstar’s own live service continuity has him alive years after his game shipped. Ineligible and dead on one side, eligible and demonstrably alive on the other. Same franchise, same question, opposite answers, and the only variable is which universe each man was written into.

That is why the continuity model is worth ten minutes of your time rather than a shrug.

Where to go from here

If you want every name run through the same filter in one place, including who has a genuine path in, that is who should return in GTA 6.

For the other ineligible headline act, read Tommy Vercetti and why GTA 6 cannot bring him back. For the strongest eligible case Rockstar has actually put back on screen, read Michael De Santa. For the sentimental favourite with the thinnest evidence, read Niko Bellic.

Big Smoke got a complete ending in 2004. He betrayed his friends, got rich, got shot, and worried about his legacy while he bled out. He got the legacy. It is a fast food order, and he would probably take it.