The original Grand Theft Auto was released on 28 November 1997 for PC. So as of the time of writing, 8th August 2026, it’s been 28 years, 8 months, and 11 days.
GTA VI is scheduled for 19 November 2026.
And then it dawned on me…
I have been playing Grand Theft Auto since Pliny The Toothless penned his spurious chronicle about Julius Caesar and the whole backstabbing incident—you know which one—and the subsequent collapse of an empire.
Give or Take Two millennia.
It has been twenty-nine years since 1997. That is long enough for empires to shift, global markets to reset, and technology to evolve past the point of recognition. It is, quite frankly, a ridiculous amount of time to spend watching digital humans walk around with no objection whatsoever to my creative acts of vehicular terrorism.
1997: A Year of Global Significance (And My Own Personal Tragedy)
Looking back, 1997 was a year of profound, history-altering significance. The world was moving at a pace that felt frantic even then:
- Hong Kong was returned to China.
- Dolly the sheep was cloned (the sheep, not the cultural icon Dolly Parton).
- A spacecraft landed on Mars.
- Princess Diana died.
- Harry Potter launched and began its conquest of global literature.
- The Spice Girls happened.
- Titanic crashed into the iceberg of global consciousness.
And then, there was my own personal crisis: Fred, my Tamagotchi, died. Twice.
(Fred VI ate himself.)
It is hard to tell which of those events left a deeper scar on the collective psyche.
The Persistence of GTA V
I have watched the Grand Theft Auto series evolve from a top-down crime game where everyone looked roughly six pixels tall into a cultural institution. It now involves Hollywood actors, billion-dollar online economies, lawsuits, memes, and an entire generation of parents wondering why their children are so dedicated to stealing virtual cars.
Then came GTA V in 2013. That sentence feels increasingly strange every time I write it. There are teenagers who played GTA V when they were children who are now approaching their thirties. It wasn’t just successful; it was persistent. It became a permanent fixture of popular culture, streamed, modified, and dissected until we knew the geography of Los Santos better than our own neighborhoods.
The Event Economy: When Gaming Becomes Everyone’s Problem
We are now approaching the release of Grand Theft Auto VI on November 19, 2026. It has accumulated a frankly unreasonable quantity of expectation. We have had trailers, leaks, and speculation about the speculation.
The 2022 leak, which saw roughly ninety videos of development footage escape into the wild, became another chapter in the game’s mythology before it even existed publicly. Even the casting has become an exercise in investigative journalism.
Somewhere along the way, GTA VI became the only video game in which identifying the actor playing the protagonist required approximately the investigative methodology normally reserved for discovering who has been leaking documents from a nuclear submarine.
Take Lucia.
Rockstar has been coy about publishing a formal ‘Manni L. Perez as Lucia’ credit on their official site.
But it didn’t matter. The internet did what it does best: it went to work.
Reddit Screamers, X Oracles, and TikTok Geniuses jumped down the proverbial rabbit hole. Through a murder board combination of voice analysis, motion-capture observation, and the kind of forensic scrutiny usually reserved for the Zapruder film, fans established Perez’s involvement long before any corporate press release could catch up.
Unfortunately, the entire X is still predicting the launch of ChatGPT 12 on a Friday at 6pm.
A Friday.
TGIF…
As for Jason? That remains a ghost story. Names like Jake McLaughlin and Alex Pettyfer (he was hot but then he wasn’t anymore) have been thrown around the rumor mill for months, but it’s all conjecture. It’s delicious, really: Rockstar turned their own casting process into a black box, ensuring that even the actors themselves have become subjects of a conspiracy theory.
I am, amongst other things (including plant kissing and wall staring), also a professional film critic.
And let’s just say I’ve never witnessed agents losing their sweat glands at the mere mention of GTA VI.
The Art of Knowing Absolutely Nothing
I don’t know whether GTA VI will be the biggest release in history or if it will satisfy 29 years of accumulated hunger (RIP Fred).
But I do know why I’m waiting for Godot’s grandmother’s sad uncle…
Some of the best moments in videogames aren’t the ones the developers point at and scream, “THIS IS IMPORTANT.”
They’re the moments when you are doing absolutely nothing of consequence.
You are driving down a road, and suddenly a car crashes beside you. Two men get out. They start fighting.
And then someone becomes a murder-person while five pedestrians scream like that time I used a pink pogo stick and slipped—
Yes.
That is what I’m waiting for. I’m waiting for the moment I turn a corner in Vice City, see something completely bizarre, and think, “What the fuck is happening?”
Because that is the moment I’ll know Grand Theft Auto has returned.
Like Lazarus.
But with more YouTube videos showing a boat clinging to a skyscraper and cars breaking the laws of… well, The Law.
And in that moment, the twenty-nine-year wait—give or Take Two millennia—would have been worth it.
Dedicated to Fred VI, the Tamagotchi who ate himself.
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