The internet got a rare update on what’s happening with Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto sequel Thursday, with publisher Take-Two Interactive narrowing the anticipated game’s release window to Fall 2025. But I wouldn’t schedule that vacation time with the boss just yet: there’s good reason to believe Take-Two might be off in their estimation by at least a few months.
“Our outlook reflects a narrowing of Rockstar Games' previously established window of Calendar 2025 to Fall of Calendar 2025 for Grand Theft Auto VI,” Take-Two said during a financial report Thursday. “We are highly confident that Rockstar Games will deliver an unparalleled entertainment experience, and our expectations for the commercial impact of the title continue to increase.”
As exciting as this may be, history dictates that maybe the public should hold their collective breaths and wait for the other, very consistent shoe to drop.
Rockstar Games has a very particular track record when it comes to delaying their massive tentpole releases. Even going back 17 years, they’ve pushed back the release dates of every major release they’ve had.
Grand Theft Auto 4, the blockbuster franchise’s big debut on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, was expected to drop October 2007. But just three months before it was scheduled to drop, Take-Two announced its delay.
“We determined today that a delay in the launch was essential to ensure the quality of Grand Theft Auto IV,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said during an August 2007 earnings call. He cited “technical challenges across the board on both PS3 and 360” as the reason.
“Having been mistaken once, we don't want to be mistaken twice,” he said about the new release date.
He wouldn’t be: GTA 4 released April 29, 2008, a day before the end of the following fiscal year’s second financial quarter as promised. But while Zelnick wasn’t wrong about GTA 4, the company would again miss their original September 2008 target for their next big game, Midnight Club Los Angeles. It would release October 2008 instead.
Red Dead Redemption, a Western twist on Rockstar’s open-world formula, was set to release in April 2010 before it was pushed to the following month.
The following year, LA Noire, a game created by Team Bondi and published by the Take-Two subsidiary, had been pushed multiple times. Take-Two initially announced it would drop sometime during the fiscal year of 2009, before Rockstar would commit to a Fall 2010 release window. In September of that year, the release date that even Geoff Keighley was confident the developer would hit, Take-Two announced yet another delay to the following year. It would finally be released in May 2011.
Max Payne 3 saw two years' worth of delays before it finally hit store shelves. Take-Two originally wanted the third-person shooter to drop in the first half of 2010, according to Zelnick, before it was pushed to the company’s fourth fiscal quarter in 2010 alongside some of the company’s other big releases, including L.A. Noire, Bioshock 2, and Civilization V.
“While we do not take the movement of any title lightly, our recent success with Red Dead Redemption illustrates the importance and the benefit of giving a title the time it needs in order to fulfill its potential in the marketplace,” then Take-Two CEO Ben Feder said at the time.
Just when it seemed that the third and final game in the trilogy had a solid release date of March 2012, hope was yanked from excited fans one final time: the publisher announced at the start of the year that it would push its release to May 2012.
Which brings us to Grand Theft Auto 5. After publishing its internet-breaking reveal trailer in Fall 2011, Rockstar announced that it was somehow aiming for a Spring 2013 release. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the following January, they published an apology to fans alongside a new release date.
“We know this is about four months later than originally planned and we know that this short delay will come as a disappointment to many of you, but, trust us, it will be worth the extra time,” a press release from the company read. “GTA V is a massively ambitious and complex game and it simply needs a little more polish to be of the standard we and, more importantly, you require.
If you think Rockstar’s fans were spared another case of deja vu with their most recent release, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, you’d be mistaken. The game was originally announced for Fall 2017, then pushed to April 2018, before finally settling on its final release date of October 26, 2018.
The games industry is fast-paced, ebbing and flowing with trends that are here one generation, and gone the next. But there are few things as dependable as a Rockstar game being delayed. As much as it pains me to say this (trust me, I want to play GTA 6 as much as the next person), I implore the collective internet to take yesterday’s announcement with a grain of salt until we’re much, much closer to release.
