After years of yearning from fans, intense speculation, rumors, unthinkably massive data breaches, and even an FBI Investigation, co-founder and President of Rockstar Games Sam Houser posted on the studio blog and Twitter account on November 8th that the “first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto” will be released in early December.
We are very excited to let you know that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you.
Thank you,
Sam Houser— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) November 8, 2023
In just a few hours, the tweet had nearly a hundred million views, almost five hundred thousand retweets, and over one million likes. All for an announcement of an announcement.
But how did hype for the next entry in the vaunted series reach such a fever pitch? Let’s take a look at everything we know about Grand Theft Auto 6.
The Earliest Reports
While we didn’t get any concrete details about GTA 6 until a report from Kotaku in 2020, there have been murmurings about GTA 6 for over a decade – before GTA 5 was even released. Between hypothetical comments from the newly-departed former president of Rockstar North, Leslie Benzies, in interviews with Digital Trends in 2012, and a TechRadar report in 2016 claiming that GTA 6 was in development, there’s been a quiet simmering of GTA 6 rumors in the background ever since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V.
That simmering turned into a slow boil when co-founder of Rockstar Games and brother to Sam, Dan Houser, spoke about the difficulty of satirizing the then-present day, stranger-than-fiction landscape: “[It’s] really unclear what we would even do with [Grand Theft Auto 6], let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did.”
Dan Houser’s (probably very honest) deflections aside, with the abundance of rumors and insider reports, it’s safe to assume some version of GTA 6 was always in at least pre-production at Rockstar since the release of Grand Theft Auto V. But we first heard reliably that GTA 6 was in development from a 2020 Kotaku report, published only a few short months after the departure of Dan Houser from the studio.
While this report was primarily focused on Rockstar’s workplace culture, it mentioned that the next GTA game was “early in development,” something confirmed to IGN by an anonymous source close to Rockstar Games. The report also mentioned a possible decrease in scope to help alleviate crunch, with larger title and map updates to be released at a future date.
While a few more leaks and rumors would arise in the next two years, it wasn’t until February 2022 that Rockstar sent out a press release announcing that development on the next GTA game was “well underway.” A decade’s worth of smoke had finally led to a very real fire, and we had official confirmation from the studio.
First Details – The ‘Big’ Report
Thankfully, the worst part of the wait seemed to be over as more info about Grand Theft Auto 6 started to drop pretty quickly soon after. Our first concrete details of the sequel from outside of Rockstar were reported by Bloomberg in July 2022, five months after Rockstar’s official announcement.
This report seemed to confirm the altered scope of GTA 6, claiming that the game would start with one city, Miami, with more to be added later. But it also mentioned that map size may be traded for density, as this new entry contained more indoor locations than any GTA game previously.
The other big detail in the report was about its duo protagonists, a pair of bank robbers likened to Bonnie and Clyde. Not much was mentioned about the male protagonist, but the female was said to be Latina. If true, this would be the first female protagonist in a GTA game since the very first Grand Theft Auto, and the first female protagonist in a fully 3D GTA game created in the style we know today.
Much of the Bloomberg report, like the Kotaku one before it, focused on the changes in workplace structure that Rockstar had undergone since Red Dead Redemption 2. A crackdown on crunch and the male-dominated workplace culture seemed to be paying real dividends for studio health, but some were frustrated with the lack of progress the game was making due to the addition of extra producers and bottlenecks in the workflow, leading to many staff members departing the studio, and casting doubt on the assumed 2024 release window.
Still, it appeared GTA 6 was indeed well on its way to completion, barring any catastrophe.
Catastrophe – The Leak
On Sunday, September 18th and two months after the Bloomberg report, a massive leak blew the development process of Grand Theft Auto 6 wide open. GTAForums user “teapotuberhacker” dropped 90 pieces of footage from the still unfinished project, including raw assets and even game code. These leaks covered everything from combat to enemy behaviors and even fully voiced conversations. And while many of the leaked materials have been scrubbed from the internet to the best of Take-Two Interactive’s ability, the leaks confirmed the earlier reports of the male and female protagonists, and the game’s setting, Miami.
Rockstar themselves confirmed the hack’s legitimacy in a tweet the next day, claiming that they would “properly introduce… this next game when it is ready.” The FBI even got involved, as the same hacking group seemed to be tied to the Uber, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung hacks.
In July 2023 a teenager was arrested in conjunction with several of these high profile hacks, including Rockstar’s. But the damage to Rockstar had been done, as much of what was in the Bloomberg report earlier that year had been seemingly confirmed.
A Message from Rockstar Games pic.twitter.com/T4Wztu8RW8
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) September 19, 2022
Additional information from the leak included details about the advances in lighting, similar to the tech developed for Red Dead 2, new systems like Money Laundering and Robberies (which would certainly fit with the Bonnie and Clyde theme), and tiny details like raccoons going through your garbage. But all of these were leaks of a game still far away from its final release, so all or none of it could be included in the final product.
GTA Online 2?
But what of GTA 6’s multiplayer? GTA Online has become its own entity separate from GTA 5, and is still going strong 10 years on. Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, filed a patent in 2021 that focuses on NPC behavior and specifically mentions “virtual navigation and management of objects in a multiplayer network gaming community.” So this could have big implications for the future of multiplayer GTA. But the patent’s details also mention Xbox One and PS4 consoles, so this could have been just something they were implementing throughout their work on GTA Online.
Regardless, whether it’s an evolution of GTA Online, a new iteration of it, or a more integrated dovetail with GTA 6, the online component of GTA remains an enormous possible cash cow and one that Rockstar isn’t likely to ignore. It’s possible that with the addition of new cities and missions, as is rumored, more online elements will make their way into the traditional single-player campaign.
GTA 6 Release Date and Platforms
Back in 2021, Tom Henderson reported rumors of a likely 2024 or 2025 release date, a window that was then corroborated by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, and VGC’s Andy Robinson on Twitter. A lot can change in two to three years of development, but in May of this year, Take-Two Interactive shared their projections for its fiscal year 2025, a period running from April of 2024 to March 2025. In those projections were some truly staggering numbers:
“In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow.”
IGN’s own Rebekah Valentine reported on the press release, saying that the past fiscal year for Take-Two “reached $5.3 Billion – a record annual high… so to achieve $8 billion Take-Two would need to make significant acquisitions, or release nearly double the amount of games it historically has, or release at least one absolute behemoth of a game.”
Given all the previous information, and Rockstar’s recent trailer announcement, it seems we can finally expect Grand Theft Auto 6 to release sometime next year, if not soon after. As far as platforms are concerned, it’s hard to imagine that as ambitious as GTA games usually are, and as far into the PS5 and Xbox Series generation we are, that we’ll see GTA 6 on the PS4 and Xbox One. But we’ll very likely eventually have a PC version, even if it’s a staggered launch with the console versions as they did with GTA V.
We’re Finally Getting GTA 6
It’s been a long road, but our first look at Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost here. We’ve been through every kind of news story imaginable, to studio restructuring, insane leaks, the departure of long-time studio heads, to even FBI Involvement in the investigation of cybercrime. And the craziest thing is that Rockstar hasn’t even called it GTA 6 yet. Only “the next Grand Theft Auto.” So they could really be cooking up anything!
But all these detours lead to the same place: the reveal trailer of what’s bound to be one of the biggest games of all time in early December.