GTA 6 has now been in development for so long it must be a world record – right?

Another delay for Grand Theft Auto 6. We get within touching distance of it and then, like a fox in the night, it runs out of sight. The new release date is a year from now – November 2026.

The wait has seemed eternal but how long has it actually been in development for? GTA 5 came out in 2013, 12 years ago – a gap that will extend to 13 years by the time GTA 6 comes out in 2026. If it arrives then. No other GTA game has taken anywhere near as long.

The gap between GTA 4 and 5 was five years; the gap between San Andreas and 4 was four years; the gap between Vice City and San Andreas was two years; and the gap between Vice City and 3 was one year. This list reads like the games industry in microcosm, and how development times have skyrocketed over the years. Will the next GTA take 20 years to make?

12 years has to be some kind of record, right? Wrong. But it’s close. There is a Guinness World Record for the longest-in-development game, and as it stands, it’s held by notorious Duke Nukem game, Duke Nukem Forever. That game was released in 2021 after a ridiculous 14 years and 43 days in development – a count reaffirmed by the Guinness World Record team in light of the GTA delay – and it absolutely wasn’t worth the wait.

But is Duke Nukem Forever’s development really the longest for a game? Beyond Good & Evil 2 begs to differ. I was there at a Parisian UbiDays event when Ubisoft first announced Beyond Good & Evil 2 in 2008, and development has been on again, off again ever since. I make that 17 years, although unlike Duke Nukem Forever, BG&E2 has yet to release and at this rate never will.

Other protracted developments include Dragon Age 4’s, a project was reworked a few times over the course of 10 years; Cyberpunk 2077’s, a game announced in 2012 and released eight years later in 2020; and Hollow Knight: Silksong’s, which lurked agonisingly out of view for six years before it was finally released this year and broke the internet. Oh and the Bloodborne remaster, which I’ve made up – it probably doesn’t exist – but that we wait on tenterhooks for every time Sony broadcasts a State of Play. One day, one day.

Here’s a list of other games with extraordinarily long development periods (correlated on NeoGAF, and curated and corroborated here, where possible, by me – you’ll see links to the evidence, as it were).

• LA Noire, announced in 2004 and released in 2011 (eight years)
• The Last Guardian, started in 2007, leaked in 2009 as Project Trico, and released in 2016 (nine years)
• Team Fortress 2, started way back in 1998 and eventually released as part of The Orange Box in 2007 (nine years)
• Doom 4, which became Doom 2016, and which was started in 2007 (nine years)
• Final Fantasy 15, which started as Final Fantasy Versus 13 in 2006 and was released in 2016 (10 years)
• Diablo 3, which began back in 2001 and launched in 2012 (11 years)
• Skull and Bones, which began as an Assassin’s Creed Black Flag expansion in 2013 and then struggled to become its own thing, eventually being released last year (11 years)
• Dead Island 2, which started way back in 2012 at Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager, before Dambuster remade it and released it in 2023 (11 years)
• Nioh, which was released in 2017 but has a long and winding history that stretches back to 2004 (13 years)
• Possibly Suicide Squad, which was referenced as being in development as early as 2010, though Rocksteady was busy with the Batman games. If it were in development then, it would have been 14 years
• And Metroid Dread, which came out in 2021 on Nintendo Switch but began life as a DS project back in 2005 (16 years)

However, there’s an important qualifying technical detail here, as far as the Guinness World Record is concerned: the game has to have been announced. This detail means Grand Theft Auto 6 only qualifies as having been in development since 2022, when it was hurriedly formally announced by Rockstar following a hacker-related game leak. The first trailer for GTA 6 – the proper reveal – didn’t happen until late 2023, meaning GTA 6’s official development is only a few years’ long, which I’m sure is nowhere near the truth.

Guinness World Records also doesn’t take into account post-release developments of a game, which are an ever elongated thing in today’s world of live-service games. World of Warcraft has been evolving for 21 years now, and it’s far from the oldest online game out there. Valve’s multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 has been up and running for 18 years. Even Grand Theft Auto Online is 12 years old. The way games are made has changed.

None of which makes the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 any shorter, of course. But like a watched pot, it will never boil if that’s all we think about. And it’s not as though there’s any shortage of other great games to play this year.