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NEW YORK — Rockstar Games announced Friday that Grand Theft Auto VI, the long-awaited sequel to a game that was itself released in 2013, has been delayed to 2036, pushing the title past three presidential elections, two planned Mars landings, and what analysts at Wedbush Securities described as "the actuarial outer edge of the franchise's original core audience."
The announcement was accompanied by a new trailer.
The trailer, which runs two minutes and forty-seven seconds, features a sun-drenched Vice City, the protagonist doing something cool with a motorcycle, and a release window graphic reading "2036.”
As of press time, the trailer had 11.2 million views. The like-to-dislike ratio was described by a Rockstar spokesperson as "healthy," before the spokesperson clarified she had not been authorized to describe it as healthy and asked that the quote not be used.
The delay marks the seventh postponement of a game that was first announced in 2022, following a leak in which a Rockstar employee's teenager accidentally uploaded forty-five minutes of early build footage to Discord.
In a note published to the Rockstar Games website, the studio's senior leadership team wrote that GTA VI would ship "when it's ready," a phrase that has appeared verbatim in five of the studio's previous six delay announcements. The eighth announcement, expected in 2029, will reportedly use the phrase "when it's truly ready," which analysts read as significant. In a follow-up call with investors, a Rockstar spokesperson said the studio was "pretty confident in the new 2036 delivery window," before adding that the team was "finding the lack of a PlayStation 7 dev kit challenging." The call ended shortly after.
"This game is going to be worth the wait," the statement read. "It has to be."
The final sentence was not in the draft reviewed by Rockstar's legal team.
Industry observers noted that the delay places GTA VI's release date approximately one year after Elder Scrolls VII, eighteen months before the next delay of Elder Scrolls VII, and at least three years before any serious conversation about Grand Theft Auto VII, which Rockstar has not announced and which does not exist and which has a subreddit with 340,000 members.
Grand Theft Auto V remains available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, and is currently the third best-selling video game of all time. It was released during the Obama administration.
