Grand Theft Auto 6 is one of the most hotly anticipated games in recently memory, but the eventual open-world adventure hasn't even been officially confirmed yet. GTA developer Rockstar Games has yet to say a word about the sequel to its 2013 release of GTA 5, which was named the best selling game of the decade. Lack of information aside, fans haven't stopped stirring up rumors, digging up alleged leaks, and parsing through Rockstar reports to find out more about GTA 6.
Nearly every bit of detail gamers have received about GTA 6 is unconfirmed, barring a few crucial morsels of information. That means the title could end up being completely unlike anything fans have been speculating about for almost two years now. Most recently, a trusted Rockstar leaker claimed that GTA 6 is "not coming soon", which means GTA Online will need to satisfy PC and next-gen console users for the time being.
While Rockstar's plans for GTA 6 are still largely a mystery, there have been a handful of supposed leaks and reports that have given fans a rough idea about when GTA 6 could release, how far along Rockstar is in developing it, and what it could be about. Here's a timeline of GTA 6 reporting and rumors that have painted a picture of where the monumental title stands right now.
GTA 6 Rumor Timeline: Project Americas
The "Project Americas" rumor was the catalyst for nearly all of the GTA 6 theories claiming that Rockstar will revive Vice City as the location for its next GTA installment. The information came from a now-deleted, 2019 Reddit post that claimed to have leaked a smorgasbord of GTA 6 details including its location, gameplay specifics, and even a rough synopsis of its plot. None of this information has been verified, so its accuracy is still very much in question. Here is the full list of rumored info below:
A lot of the contents of the Project Americas seem far too detailed to be true, especially since more trustworthy reports have revealed the game is in the early stages of development. There are still some portions of the list that aren't as farfetched and have even resurfaced in subsequent rumors.
Specifically, the section claiming that GTA 6 would let players travel between multiple cities including Vice City and new, South America-inspired locations. Fans believe that the recently-released Cayo Perico Heist update for GTA Online was a sneaky teaser for Rockstar's plans to send players back to the tropics, but that has not been confirmed.
GTA 6 Rumor Timeline: Confirmed To Be In Development
The Project Americas rumors stirred up a plethora of less-than-legitimate speculations and phony release date chatter. Then in April 2020, games journalist Jason Schreier published a lengthy feature in Kotaku that explained Rockstar's company-wide effort to reduce the amount of crunch it puts its developers through, which included a juicy tidbit of GTA 6 news.
Schreier had revealed that GTA 6 was actively in development at Rockstar, a crucial detail that had yet to be confirmed at the time. He then clarified on Twitter that the next GTA installment is "still a ways away," nixing any hope fans had of getting an announcement sometime soon. Schreier cited anonymous sources for these claims, but he has been reporting on the politics and working conditions of the gaming industry for years. He doesn't often name his sources in stories that contain sensitive company information, but he's a journalist who attaches his name and reputation to his stories as opposed to anonymous leakers.
Two of these leakers — Yan2295 and Tezfun2 — publicly responded to Schreier's report stating that they believe GTA 6 is much further along that his report claimed. The duo claimed the title had reach the midway point in its development cycle, while Schreier's reporting suggested it's still at its inception, however, Yan2295 seems to have walked back his statements on January 2, 2021 stating that GTA 6 was "not coming soon."
Schreier's report is the most solid piece of evidence gamers have about the status of GTA 6. It took Rockstar eight years to develop Red Dead Redemption 2, so if it's still in the early phases of creation then it might be somewhere around six years away.
GTA 6 Rumor Timeline: Vice City Soundtrack
Months after Schreier's report in August, fresh evidence surfaced that GTA 6 could be a revival of GTA: Vice City from an unexpected source. A synthwave musician Peter Brian Rice, tweeted that "music rights clearing people" affiliated with Rockstar had allegedly reached out to synthwave artists to use their music in some capacity.
Fans immediately believed that this was the company trying to put together one of the many GTA radio stations that are featured in the open-world game. The synthwave music genre is typically associated with films and games from the 1980s, which was the reason why fans jumped to that conclusion. Rice's tweet has since been deleted and there hasn't been any further confirmation to prove his statement.
GTA 6 Rumor Timeline: Leaked Map
In October, an allegedly leaked image of GTA 6's world map appeared online that once again revived hopes that the title is destined to return to Vice City. The map was originally posted to online forum 4chan and depicted a nondescript island that is extremely similar to an island seen in an even earlier alleged GTA 6 map leak posted in December 2018.
Those original images were almost immediately shunned as being bogus because of how crudely drawn they appeared, but subsequent image that surfaced in October made fans rethink their conclusion. What if the first patch of drawings were real and years after that leak Rockstar had added more details to the island where GTA 6 would eventually take place?
There's not much evidence to go off of, but Rockstar's game maps have leaked in the past. An early version of RDR2's map was leaked two years before the Western's launch. That image turned out to be completely accurate, which is why fans didn't want to rule out the possibility that something similar happened during GTA 6's development. Gamers will need to wait for Rockstar to officially announce the title before anything is certain, but the the way some of these rumors have tracked over the course of the past year has raised the collective eyebrow of GTA's online fanbase, and most signs suggest it's eyeing a 2025 release at the earliest.