GTA 6 release won’t be delayed again now that it has a “specific date”, assures Take-Two boss

Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has served up some dutiful, investor-pleasing sentiments about GTA 6’s delay from 2025 release to a 26th May 2026 launch date. Rockstar, he says, are “seeking perfection”, and “consumer anticipation is unprecedented”. As such, “affording Rockstar additional time for such a groundbreaking project is a worthy investment”.

All that’s from a hot mix of Take-Two Interactive’s latest quarterly financial results and an interview with our colleagues/primordial mythical adversaries at the Ice Giant Network. Speaking to IGN, Zelnick commented that the need for “continued polish became clear” as the game neared completion, and that “there was an opportunity with a small amount of incremental time, we thought, to make sure Rockstar Games achieves its creative vision with no limitations.”

Regarding the inevitable question of whether GTA 6 will be delayed again, he added that “historically when we set a specific date, generally speaking, we’ve been very good about reaching it.” Which is possibly more true in console land: GTA 5 was pushed back once on console from its initial spring window to 17th September 2013, but the PC version didn’t arrive till 14th April 2015.

In the earnings presentation, Zelnick reiterated that “affording Rockstar additional time for such a groundbreaking project is a worthy investment”. He also threw in a bit of trivia. Apparently, GTA 6 “began development in earnest in 2020” after Red Dead Redemption 2. The recent second GTA 6 trailer is supposedly the “biggest video launch of all time, with over 475 million views in 24 hours”. Spotify streams of the song from that trailer, Hot Together by the Pointer Sisters, have “surged by 182,000%, once again proving Rockstar’s ability to influence popular culture”.

This is probably my 9am brain talking, but I find this last point sort of provocative inasmuch as right now, I’m scratching my head a little about the specifics of GTA’s cultural impact. It is an undeniable influence on popular culture, be it in the form of moral panics about kiddies playing crime simulators, or in how its urban sandbox has influenced open world designers, or in the vast extent of the modding community, or – yes – in how it has popularised certain songs.

That said, and for all the game’s stature, GTA today is innately and proudly derivative. It skims the froth of American life, sometimes satirically in the form of, say, Bleeter, and often affectionately in the form of nods to celebrated movies and TV shows – GTA 6’s star couple Jason and Lucia are influencer incarnations of Bonnie and Clyde. One consequence of that is a certain hollowness.