Depending on where you look, the mere mention of GTA 6 can send you down an online hole faster than a white rabbit late for a very important date. Alice in Wonderland is indeed a fitting analogy when examining the conversation around the next step for the Grand Theft Auto series, because untangling fact from fiction, and separating imagination from reality, has underpinned the narrative for the last several years.
In February 2022, when Rockstar Games officially confirmed that GTA 6 was being actively worked on, speculation from impatient fans hit new heights. The GTA 6 mega leak of September the same year – whereby over 90 in-development screens and videos were leaked to the public – cranked things up several notches, with every image and snippet of video torn apart and dissected from every which angle. Surely, we thought, the stage was set for something concrete in 2023, not least because the series' most recent entry, GTA 5, was set to celebrate its 10th birthday on September 17.
