Fans think they've found the release date of GTA 6 in a 12-year-old game.
The release of GTA 6 has been desperately awaited by the franchise's fans. Now, some of them think that they've found its release date in a game that's 12 years old.
GTA 6
Grand Theft Auto 5 is one of the best-selling video games in history, secondary to Minecraft. The action-adventure developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games was released in 2013, over a decade ago.
And its sequel, GTA 6 is on its way - it has been for years upon years at this point. This will be the eighth main Grand Theft Auto game, and the sixteenth part of the franchise overall. Rockstar only officially confirmed that the game was in development in 2022, at which point fans had already been waiting and speculating for a long time.
While there were some leaks in the meantime and the basic concept of the main storyline is already known, it was only officially revealed in December 2023 and is scheduled to be released in late 2025, though it doesn't have an official release date yet - "official" being the keyword because there's a lot of speculation in the series' community.
Alleged Release Date Found In Old Game
It's of course understandable that fans are getting desperate after waiting for new content for such a long time but some might be taking the theories too far.
In a post on a subreddit dedicated to GTA 6, a user posted that they had found a poster in Max Payne 3, from 2013, that features a series of dates that align with Rockstar game release dates. Within the game, the poster is supposed to show tour dates of the fictional heavy metal band Love Fist:
GTA 6 coming 10/29 - revealed by a poster in Max Payne 3 (2013). by u/arnavjadhav23 in GTA6
It seems that Rockstar just aligned these "tour dates" with their game releases as an Easter egg at the time. And while most of the dates on this poster do align with release dates of Rockstar's games, two of the dates don't have a game release that coincides with them - if one was actually meant to represent GTA 6, what does the other date stand for?
Also, the suspected release date for GTA 6, October 29, is also when GTA: Vice City was released, so the date could have just represented that game.
And yet another issue with this theory is that it would have taken an immense amount of planning from Rockstar to be certain that the game was going to be ready for release on that day twelve years ahead - although to be fair, the dates on the poster only include the day and month but not the year in which the games were/are published, so Rockstar could technically finish the game earlier and then consciously wait until this date with the release.
Still, with GTA 6's chaotic history full of speculation and uncertainty about whether it was even going to be released at all, it might be risky to get your hopes up before the release is officially announced - you might end up disappointed.
Are you excitedly waiting for GTA 6? Do you think that there might be something to this release date theory? Let us know in the comments!