3D ‘GTA’ Delays, Ranked
After a second six-month delay of ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ ensured at least a 13-year wait between sequels, we revisit—and rank—the most painful postponements in the recent history of the franchise
The sequel to the last Grand Theft Auto game is still a long way away, but the sequel to the last GTA game delay has already arrived. On Thursday afternoon, GTA developer Rockstar Games announced that Grand Theft Auto VI will launch on November 19, 2026, almost six months later than its previous planned premiere, May 26, 2026. That destined-to-be-missed target of next spring was announced this past May, when the game was delayed six months beyond its original release window of fall 2025. (As in, now.) In other words, when 2025 began, GTA VI was officially touted to be less than a year away. Now, as 2025 winds down, the game is more than a year away. The closer it gets, the further away it appears.
Funnily enough, rumors swirled earlier this week that a new trailer for the game was about to be released. Instead, the second six-month delay in a span of less than six months dropped. If it’s any consolation, GTA publisher Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick said, “We feel really good about” the latest date. It probably isn’t any consolation, though, because back in February (i.e., two GTA delays ago), Zelnick said “We feel really good about” the game being out in fall 2025. And if you’re trying to take solace in the fact that Zelnick also said on Thursday that he's “highly confident on the new date,” remember that less than three months ago, when asked about his level of certainty that the game would arrive next May, he said, “My level of conviction is very, very high, obviously.” Obviously.
Most of what I wrote about the May delay still applies. “We’re all pushing hard to seek perfection,” Zelnick said on Thursday, and though that goal is unattainable, extra time in the oven will probably be good for the game. The version of GTA VI that Rockstar will deliver in November 2026 (or, well, whenever) will likely be better than the version we would have gotten this fall or next spring. Odds are the reprieve will benefit Rockstar, too, which can strive for what it called “the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve” without overly stressing its staff. Just like the game’s previous delays, this shift is bad news for anyone who has a competing title slated for release around GTA VI’s new due date, but most gamers won’t have trouble filling the time until next November. It’s not as if there aren’t already too many good games for any one person to play.
Still, few fans seem to “feel really good about” the second postponement of 2025, even though it wasn’t wildly surprising. (On Thursday morning, Polymarket prognosticators put the odds of an additional delay around 40 percent; as of Friday afternoon, traders on Kalshi gave the game a 27 percent chance of suffering a third delay that would push it into 2027.) Zelnick, of course, is the corporate muckety-muck whose job it is to reassure investors that the game isn’t vaporware and that it will be worth the wait both creatively and financially. (Take-Two’s share price fell more than 7 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday, despite the strong second-quarter earnings reveal that accompanied—and, for Take-Two stockholders, partly cushioned the impact of—the postponement.) He’s not the one who’s actually responsible for finishing GTA VI. That’s Rockstar, which has a history of making great games that take longer than anticipated to complete.
The original Grand Theft Auto, released by Rockstar North predecessor DMA Design in November 1997 for MS-DOS and Windows, was “hugely delayed,” according to a 2013 minidocumentary made by The Guardian, in which creative director Gary Penn says of the game’s developers, “The milestones they were meant to uphold didn’t really materialize.” Almost every release in the series since then has continued that tradition.
Granted, Rockstar doesn’t delay only GTA titles: Numerous games made by various Rockstar studios this century—including Smuggler’s Run 2, Manhunt and Manhunt 2, The Warriors, Bully, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Red Dead Redemption, and Max Payne 3—have endured delays. (Red Dead Redemption 2 was delayed twice.) Nor is Rockstar uniquely prone to inaccurate estimates; all across the industry, games get delayed all the time. In fact, Skydance Games announced a second, indefinite delay of Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra just five minutes before Rockstar stole its postponement thunder.
However, Rockstar is under a much more powerful microscope than most game-makers, especially where GTA is concerned. And the company’s cadence of releases has slowed dramatically of late. The chart below shows the number of days between the official announcement and release of each 3D, mainline, non-portable GTA game, assuming GTA VI sticks to its re-revised forecast. Naturally, fans are always aware that Rockstar is working on a sequel of some sort before Rockstar divulges details—a hacker published footage of GTA VI more than a year before the game’s grand unveiling—but this chart starts the countdown to debut at the point when Rockstar grudgingly lifted the lid on any or all of the following: title, location, plot details, screenshots, trailer.
In the franchise’s PlayStation 2 era, it was standard for GTA games to get announced less than a year before people could purchase and play them (delays notwithstanding). If GTA VI doesn’t tarry past next November, almost three years will have passed since Rockstar revealed the open secret of the open-world game’s name, setting (a modern-day Vice City), and protagonists (Lucia and Jason) in December 2023. That’s an awfully long time to maintain a six-star wanted level.
In GTA VI’s case, though, that protracted post-announcement wait is actually the home stretch of a much longer wait. This second graph displays the number of days between the releases of each mainline, non-portable GTA game, again taking GTA VI’s November 2026 target as gospel.
By next November, more than 13 years (or almost 5,000 days) will have passed since Grand Theft Auto V’s September 2013 release—a year longer than the gulf between GTA III and GTA V. There isn’t much mystery about why the interminable vigil for GTA VI has already doubled the longest lull between GTA games: GTA V is still a sales juggernaut, a live-service money-printing machine that keeps cash flowing into Rockstar’s coffers (and, by extension, Take-Two’s) even in the absence of a sequel. The second-bestselling game of all time was one of 2025’s 20 top-selling titles through August, 12 years (and two console generations) after it came out. It’s still the second-most-popular game on Twitch. And its online mode, which Rockstar still supports with new content, remains a major draw. On Thursday, Zelnick trumpeted not only GTA V’s 220-plus-million units sold, but the 20 percent year-over-year growth of GTA Online subscription service GTA+, both of which ease the pressure on Rockstar to “rush” (as if) a sequel.
Triple-A games take longer to make than they used to, even at top speed, and Rockstar has been in no hurry. GTA VI’s protracted development could backfire in multiple ways. For one, it could cut into Take-Two’s profit margins: More development time means more money spent, but it won’t necessarily translate into more money made from a game that will almost certainly boast the most lucrative launch ever whether its Metacritic score stands at 94 or 97. More relevant to most gamers, the series’ extended hiatus, and the increasingly long list of things we “got before GTA VI,” could suppress hype instead of inciting it, raise expectations to an unrealistic level, or even make the game feel less revolutionary than it might have years earlier; it’s not as if other studios are standing still while Rockstar keeps polishing. Like Chinese Democracy (which took roughly as long to create), it might miss its moment to seize the popular imagination.
Most likely, though, the game will be great and extremely successful, like a lot of delayed Rockstar blockbusters before it. And so, to fritter away a few more of the minutes remaining between now and next November, let’s rank GTA delays, in order of how agonizing they were for fans.
A few ground rules: We’ll include only publicly acknowledged delays, not internal delays that preceded a game’s announcement. (For instance, Rockstar reportedly had its sights set on early 2025 for GTA VI before the fall 2025 timetable was publicly promoted.) We’ll also limit the scope of our survey to the 3D, mainline, non-portable games beginning with GTA III, excluding the likes of 2006 PlayStation Portable game Vice City Stories (delayed once), 2009 Nintendo DS game Chinatown Wars (delayed once), and 2009 GTA IV DLC The Lost and Damned (delayed twice). And we won’t count delayed international release dates, ports to other platforms, or revamped re-releases. That leaves us with a grand total of seven qualifying delays, which we’ll list from least psychologically scarring to most.
Take heart, impatient fans: As far as I can tell, no Grand Theft Auto game has ever been rescheduled three times after it was announced, so surely GTA VI’s third release date will be the charm. Not that anyone would be shocked if this sequel explored even more uncharted terrain in the delayed-release realm.
7. GTA III
Delay date: September 19, 2001
Time until previous release date: 2 weeks
Length of delay: 3 weeks
Apology/Excuse: “We apologize to you and all the people waiting for this game to ship for the delays that have now ensued, but I'm sure you can understand our reasoning. Rest assured the game will be phenomenal ... and you can expect it to hit shelves in late October!”
Rockstar had a very valid reason for delaying the first, groundbreaking game of the franchise’s 3D era: Its original release date of October 3, 2001, was a few weeks after September 11. The 9/11 terrorist attacks not only physically hampered the production of the game, which took place partly in New York City, but they also forced Rockstar to make an array of mostly cosmetic changes to the game for sensitivity reasons.
This is the least painful delay on the list, for a few fairly obvious reasons. First, it pushed the game back by only a few weeks. Second, GTA wasn’t yet the groundbreaking cultural sensation it was about to become, so the stakes were relatively low. Third, the delay (and accompanying cover redesign) led directly to the iconic cover template the series still employs. Fourth, GTA III had plenty of company among movies, shows, and games that felt the effects of the tragic time. And five—and most importantly—the country was already in much more acute pain than could be caused by a video game. In September 2001, the GTA delay barely registered.
6. GTA: Vice City
Delay date: September 6, 2002
Time until previous release date: 6 weeks
Length of delay: 1 week
Apology/excuse: “Rockstar representatives stated that the delay is to ensure that there will be enough copies of the game on store shelves to meet demand.”
The original announcement of Vice City’s delay, which Gamespot said appeared on the game’s official, Flash-centric site, appears to be lost to time, so I’m not sure if Rockstar said sorry. But the developers hardly had to, considering the insignificance of the sin. The concept of a one-week GTA delay seems positively quaint in 2025, as does the notion of needing extra time to manufacture physical copies of the game. Considering that Vice City came out almost exactly one year(!) after GTA III, a one-week increase in the time between those two games is, proportionally speaking, equivalent to more than three months in the time between GTA V and GTA VI.
If anything, I’m actually grateful to this delay for giving me an opportunity to appreciate the minor miracle of creation that spawned Vice City in a mere nine months of full-speed development. They don’t make ’em as quickly as they used to.
5. GTA: San Andreas
Delay date: September 9, 2004
Time until previous release date: 40 days
Length of delay: 1 week
Apology/excuse: “The title's launch date was moved to allow additional time for final testing of the game, which exceeds the size, depth and scope of traditional video games.”
Another one-week delay—more of an “absence makes the heart grow fonder” situation than a cause for mourning, even though a week feels a lot longer when you’re as young as most of GTA’s audience was in 2004 than it does as an adult. This blip was eminently understandable, given that San Andreas came out only two years after Vice City and was about twice as big as its PS2 predecessors.
“Though the one-week push is obviously not the end of the world, it will still likely be taken rather badly by the anxious Grand Theft Auto contingent,” IGN wrote. Oh, sweet summer children.
4. GTA VI (delay no. 2)
Delay date: November 6, 2025
Time until previous release date: ~6 months
Length of delay: ~6 months
Apology/excuse: “We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.”
Rockstar struck a conciliatory tone in announcing GTA VI’s second delay, concluding with “we want to thank you again for your patience and support.” This postponement was the same length as the first one (see below), but it didn’t leave as much of a mark since we’ve built up a tolerance to such setbacks. At this point, Take-Two and Rockstar are the companies that cried GTA VI; we’ll believe it’s coming out when we’re able to boot it up, and not a moment before. Insert an applicable idiom here: “Once bitten, twice shy” works; so does “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Delay date: January 31, 2013
Time until previous release date: ~4 months
Length of delay: ~4 months
Apology/excuse: "We know this is about four months later than originally planned and we know that this short delay will come as a disappointment to many of you, but, trust us, it will be worth the extra time. GTA V is a massively ambitious and complex game and it simply needs a little more polish to be of the standard we and, more importantly, you require. To all Grand Theft Auto fans, please accept our apologies for the delay, and our promise that the entire team here is working very hard to make the game all it can be. We are doing all we can to help ensure it will meet if not exceed your expectations come September—we thank you for your support and patience.”
3. GTA V
In 2013, five-plus years between flagship GTA games seemed like an eternity, but a few factors made this announcement easier to swallow. For one thing, we’d seen this film before; after a handful of 3D GTAs and several rounds of delays, we knew the drill. For another, GTA V never had a more exact pre-delay release date than “spring,” so a postponement seemed almost inevitable. Plus, a mere four months, tacked on when the game was still expected to be about that far away, was better than—well, keep scrolling.
2. GTA VI (delay no. 1)
Delay date: May 2, 2025
Time until previous release date: ~6 months
Length of delay: ~6 months
Apology/excuse: “We are very sorry that this is later than you expected. The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game. With every game we have released, the goal has always been to try and exceed your expectations, and Grand Theft Auto VI is no exception. We hope you understand that we need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve.”
When we reached May without a release date more specific than “fall,” the writing seemed to be on the wall: If GTA VI were really coming out so soon, wouldn’t we know precisely when? Then again, the closer that nebulous season got, the less likely it looked that Rockstar would be cruel enough to take away our toy after dangling it out of reach for a dozen years. After all, the company clearly took its sweet time announcing a release range. Wouldn’t the designers have made damn sure they could hit their target before sharing one? Plus, in late April, another big-budget Take-Two title, Borderlands 4, moved its scheduled arrival forward, from September 23 to September 12. Release dates don’t usually shift in that direction. Surely this could mean only one thing: GTA’s publisher was clearing the decks for its huge holiday system-seller!
This was, of course, cope. And while no one was gullible enough to be blown away by a GTA delay in 2025, it was still demoralizing to allow hope (and hype) into our hearts, glimpse the finish line, and then realize that there was no telling how long a race we really had to run.
1. GTA IV
Delay date: August 2, 2007
Time until previous release date: 75 days
Length of delay: ~6 months
Apology: “Certain elements of development proved to be more time-intensive than expected, especially given the commitment for a simultaneous release on two very different platforms.”
Speaking from personal experience: This one stung. By 2007, GTA had become a crossover mainstream powerhouse, such that GTA IV’s delay disrupted the industry and drew the notice of the trades. And the prospect of GTA’s leap from the PS2 to the high-def, souped-up PS3 and Xbox 360 was intoxicating. As Rockstar’s Sam Houser said, “The new consoles are allowing us to create the Grand Theft Auto game we always dreamed about. Every aspect of the game and its design has been completely transformed. The game is huge and is pushing the hardware platforms to their absolute limits. The top engineers from Sony and Microsoft are working closely with the team in Edinburgh right now, helping us to fully leverage the power of both platforms. As always, our goal is to surpass even the wildest expectations of the game’s fans, and to create the ultimate high-definition video game experience.”
All of which only made the prospect of four more months without GTA IV hurt worse. My expectations were, in fact, wild, and Houser’s explanation didn’t diminish them. Back then, three years between full-fledged GTA games seemed like a long time. And yanking the football away without warning when we were only two and a half months away from finally embodying Niko Bellic seemed especially cruel.
“Obviously, we are very disappointed to reduce guidance after having previously reaffirmed it,” Take-Two CEO Ben Feder said. You and me both, Ben. Investors were also upset that Take-Two’s stock price plunged 19 percent in after-hours trading. According to industry analyst Michael Pachter (as paraphrased by Variety), the sell-off was so steep because “investors fear that all future GTA sequels will now come later than expected.” In retrospect, a rational concern! Yet, then Take-Two chairman Zelnick proclaimed, “We will not choose expediency over the long-term success of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.”
This delay ruined my day. Yet all these years later, I hardly remember the months I spent pining for what turned out to be a fantastic game. Let that be a lesson to us as we steel ourselves for (at least) one more year without GTA VI.
