Prologue

The Prologue is Grand Theft Auto V's opening mission — a flashback bank robbery set in a snow-covered North Yankton roughly nine years before V's main story. Three masked robbers — Michael, Trevor, and a third partner named Brad — execute the heist; the getaway goes wrong; the mission ends with Michael presumed dead and Trevor walking away believing it. The whole sequence is V's setup for everything that follows: it's the deal that put Michael into witness protection and the reason Trevor doesn't know his partner is alive in Rockford Hills until V's middle act.

What's confirmed

• Mission position: Opening mission of V's main story. Plays before the title card. Establishes the playable-protagonist mechanic via the heist's three-man structure.
• Setting: North Yankton — V's fictional Midwestern state analog, snow-coded, distinctly different from the Los Santos / Blaine County tonal range.
• Era: ~2004, roughly nine years before V's main story (set in 2013).
• Characters in the mission: Michael, Trevor, and Brad (the third member of the original crew, never directly playable in the main story timeline).
• Narrative role: Sets up Michael's witness-protection deal, establishes Trevor's grievance (which becomes V's middle-act pivot), and seeds the Brad question that gets resolved in a later flashback mission.
• Tonal register: snow / industrial / desolation — a deliberate counter to V's sun-bleached Los Angeles register, signaling V's willingness to range tonally before settling in.

What this entry doesn't yet include

Deferred until verifiable:

• Specific mission objectives in player-instruction order
• Specific dialogue and the prologue's exact opening line
• Cinematic beats and the post-heist transition into the present-day Los Santos opening
• Specific weapons / vehicles used in the prologue
• Linkage details to the later flashback mission that returns to North Yankton
• Specific North Yankton geography / town name

Why it's catalog-worthy

The Prologue is one of V's most-discussed opening hours in modern Rockstar storytelling. It does three things at once: introduces the multi-protagonist mechanic, sets up Michael's existential crisis as V's emotional engine, and handles V's largest narrative load-bearing structure (the Trevor-thinks-his-partner-is-dead pivot) in under fifteen minutes of gameplay.

For openings, mainline GTA's standard pattern was to drop the player into the main setting and let them learn it slowly. V breaks that pattern by giving the player a flashback in a totally different geography first, and the Prologue is the proof Rockstar is willing to violate the standard opening to set up a longer arc. GTA VI's opening (Lucia walking out of the corrections facility — per the Lucia codex entry) is structurally simpler but tonally as load-bearing; the comparison is worth tracking.

What's connected

• Michael De Santa — the prologue's setup is Michael's entire pre-V backstory
• Trevor Philips — the prologue is the shared past Trevor remembers and Michael is hiding from
• Los Santos — present-day setting V transitions to immediately after the prologue ends

Sources

• Grand Theft Auto V (2013) — base game, primary source
• Rockstar Newswire archive — V launch context

Skeleton entry. Specific objective list, dialogue, and cinematic beat references land when sourced.