As of April 2026, Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled for release on November 19, 2026. It will be the first new Grand Theft Auto game in thirteen years, the longest gap between mainline entries in the series by a wide margin. For fans who grew up with the franchise, thirteen years is enough time for a kid who finished San Andreas in middle school to have bought a house, a college student from GTA V’s launch to be raising their own kids, or a whole new generation to discover the series through streamers without ever playing the older games.
Before GTA 6 lands, it’s worth understanding where the series has been. The Grand Theft Auto franchise is about to turn twenty-nine years old. It has gone from a top-down 2D curiosity on MS-DOS to one of the most profitable entertainment products ever made. It is widely credited with setting the template for open-world games more than once. It has survived controversies, lawsuits, and hacking leaks.
This is the story of how we got from there to here, and what that history tells us about the game we are about to play.
1997 to 1999: The early years
The studio that made the first Grand Theft Auto was DMA Design, a small operation in Dundee, Scotland better known at the time for making Lemmings. The game released in November 1997, first on MS-DOS and Windows, with a PlayStation version following in December and a Game Boy Color port in 1999. The game was almost canceled multiple times during development, and it very nearly shipped under a different name: Race ‘n’ Chase, where the player was supposed to be a police officer chasing criminals. That premise flipped during development once the team realized players wanted to be the criminal, not the cop.
The game itself looked almost nothing like what Grand Theft Auto would become. The view was top-down, and the cars and characters were small flat 2D graphics rather than 3D models. There were three fictional cities: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. The gameplay was built around completing missions to rack up a points total. Reviews at the time were mixed. Most averaged six or seven out of ten.
What it did introduce, though, was the basic formula: an open city, a criminal protagonist, radio stations to soundtrack the chaos, and a willingness to let the player be the villain that gave the game a rebellious edge at a time when a lot of commercial games were about saving princesses or the world. Grand Theft Auto 2 followed in 1999, set in a near-future city and pushing the series’ reach a little further. Neither game was a breakthrough.
2001 to 2004: The 3D revolution
By 2001, DMA Design had been acquired by Take-Two Interactive and would soon be renamed Rockstar North, the studio that would carry the series forward from that point on. In October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on PlayStation 2. It was a radical shift from anything the series had done before. Instead of the top-down view, the player was now behind the character, moving through the fully 3D streets and skyscrapers of Liberty City. This version was reimagined from the 1997 original, a fictional version of New York City. The streets were busy with pedestrians, radio stations played licensed music and fake commercials, and missions told a story instead of just racking up points. It was the game that turned Grand Theft Auto into a commercial phenomenon.
GTA III was not the first open-world game, but it is widely credited as the one that established the modern open-world template. The formula was simple: drive anywhere, steal any car, follow the story at your own pace. Critics and players both treated GTA III as a landmark. For years afterward, nearly every ambitious action game was described as “a GTA clone.”
Both Vice City and San Andreas, names that had appeared as cities in the 1997 original, would be revisited as their own games over the next few years, each reimagined for the 3D era.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City followed one year later, in October 2002. This version was set in Miami in 1986, and the game doubled down on atmosphere: neon, pastels, Hawaiian shirts, and a soundtrack built from 1980s hits. It was also the first game in the series with a voiced main character. Tommy Vercetti, voiced by Ray Liotta (who died in 2022), gave Grand Theft Auto its first lead with a defined personality.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas released in October 2004, and it was bigger than anything before it. The setting was no longer a single city but an entire fictional state, based on California and Nevada, with three major cities and miles of countryside, mountains, and desert between them. The story followed CJ, a young man returning to his hometown after his mother’s murder. The game’s themes (gang life, corruption, the early 1990s) explored different thematic territory than the earlier games had attempted. San Andreas became the best-selling game on the PlayStation 2 and is widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed games in the franchise.
San Andreas also brought the series its biggest controversy. In 2005, modders discovered hidden sexual content in the game’s code that could be unlocked with a fan-made mod, which became known as “Hot Coffee.” The discovery triggered a congressional inquiry, a class action lawsuit, and a temporary re-rating of the game to Adults Only, forcing retailers to pull it from shelves until Rockstar released a corrected version. Take-Two eventually settled the lawsuit for millions. The incident shaped how Rockstar handled content disclosure for years afterward and became a reference point in broader debates about video games and government regulation.
Three games in four years. Each one larger than the last. By the end of 2004, Grand Theft Auto was no longer a cult curiosity. It had become one of the most important series in video games.
2008: GTA IV and the shift to realism
Grand Theft Auto IV arrived in April 2008, four years after San Andreas. Where San Andreas had gone in for scale and spectacle (jetpacks, parachutes, a map so big it took real time to drive across), GTA IV went smaller and more serious. The map shrank. The tone darkened. The jetpacks disappeared. What Rockstar delivered instead was the most detailed version of Liberty City they had ever built, running on a new game engine that allowed for more realistic proportions, lighting, and character animation than the earlier games could achieve.
The game followed Niko Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant who comes to Liberty City chasing a cousin’s promises of the American dream and instead gets pulled into the city’s criminal underworld. Niko’s story was the most serious the series had attempted. His past in the Yugoslav Wars shaped his present. His relationships with his cousin and the people he worked for were a major part of the story. The game’s mocking humor was still there, especially in its send-up of American consumerism and celebrity, but the core story was not played for laughs.
GTA IV received perfect scores from a long list of publications, shipped millions of copies in its first week, and set industry sales records that GTA V would break five years later. Some fans missed the scale and the absurdity of San Andreas. But reviews agreed: GTA IV was a step forward for the series. A smaller map, rebuilt with more technical detail than the earlier games. A story focused on its lead character.
2013 to present: GTA V and the longest gap
Grand Theft Auto V released on September 17, 2013, and the numbers it put up in its first few days were unlike anything the industry had seen. It sold 11.21 million copies on its first day. It grossed 815 million dollars in 24 hours. It crossed one billion in three days, making it the fastest entertainment product in history to do so. By the end of its opening week, it had outsold the biggest films and music releases of the year. Seven Guinness World Records fell in a single week.
Those records were the beginning, not the peak. GTA V kept selling. The original release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was followed by a new version for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014, then PC in 2015. Each new platform brought a new wave of buyers. In 2020, seven years after the original release, the game sold more copies than in any single year since launch. A PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S version arrived in 2022. As of April 2026, GTA V has shipped over 225 million copies worldwide, making it the second best-selling video game of all time and one of the most profitable entertainment products ever made.
The game itself was bigger and more over-the-top than GTA IV, more in line with San Andreas. It was set in a reimagined Los Angeles, following three playable protagonists: Michael, a retired bank robber living in a strained marriage; Franklin, a young man trying to get out of a dead-end life; and Trevor, whose violent and unpredictable behavior gave the game its darker scenes. The map was larger than anything Rockstar had built before, covering not just the city but the hills, beaches, and rural areas around it.
Then, in October 2013, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto Online. Initially positioned as a multiplayer side mode, it became a dominant part of the GTA V experience. GTA Online kept getting updates for years, expanding into heists, businesses, a cold-war-era DLC, and other ongoing content. The revenue from microtransactions in GTA Online is estimated in the billions.
And so the gap began. GTA V kept selling. Rockstar kept updating the online game. The studio released Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018 to similar critical acclaim, but no new Grand Theft Auto. Years passed. The PlayStation 4 generation came and went. The PlayStation 5 launched. Still no GTA 6. In September 2022, someone hacked Rockstar and leaked early development footage of the next game, confirming for the first time that it was set in a version of Florida and starred a man and a woman. Rockstar formally acknowledged the leak.
In December 2023, more than ten years after GTA V’s release, Rockstar finally revealed Grand Theft Auto VI. The first trailer introduced Lucia, the game’s first female protagonist, and confirmed the setting: the fictional state of Leonida, a reimagining of modern-day Florida, with Vice City as the backdrop. The trailer broke records for views. Eighteen months later, a second trailer arrived in May 2025, putting Jason at the center alongside Lucia and announcing a release date at last: May 26, 2026. The release has since moved to November 19, 2026, thirteen years after GTA V. The longest gap in the series by far, and one of the longest in gaming history.
What the wait tells us
Thirteen years between mainline entries is not just a long gap. It creates a specific kind of pressure on the game that is finally arriving.
When GTA V launched in 2013, the iPhone 5 was the newest phone on the market. Barack Obama was in his second term. Netflix had just started making its own shows. The PlayStation 4 was two months away from release. The children who played GTA V in middle school are now in their late twenties. Some of them have kids of their own. And the game they played as teenagers is still, somehow, one of the most-played games in the world.
The children who played GTA V in middle school are now in their late twenties. Some of them have kids of their own.
The scale of the audience waiting is clear. GTA V is the second best-selling video game of all time. The first GTA 6 trailer broke YouTube view records within hours. Whatever Rockstar delivers in November 2026, it will be released into the most anticipated launch moment the series has ever had.
The wait is almost over. Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled for November 19, 2026. Rockstar has said the marketing campaign will begin in summer. Until then, the series has already done most of what a game series can do. It has sold the units, broken the records, defined the genre, and outlasted the studio that created it. The only thing left is the game itself, and the question of whether thirteen years was worth the wait. For now, that answer comes in November.