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Rumor Check: Everything We've Heard about Grand Theft Auto 6
We're still waiting for Rockstar's next Grand Theft Auto vehicular masterpiece, but we'll settle for location, story and auto details.
The Grand Theft Auto video game series from Rockstar Games is a perennial all-star when it comes to sales, downloads, and quality—also car theft, obviously. GTA V, which was released almost seven years ago when the PlayStation 4 went on sale, has kept fans busy with online play and downloadable expansions, but everyone is really waiting for word on the next installment. Here's everything we have heard so far. Note that Rockstar is notoriously secretive with this stuff, but it's fun to sift through the theories.
You can get GTA V for free on PC from now until May 21 at the Epic games store. The site has been down at times earlier this week, presumably because everyone is trying to download the free game—so keep trying.
Where will Grand Theft Auto 6 be set?
Our dream situation is a Grand Theft Auto 6 Midwestern map with Detroit or Chicago leading the way, with travel between the two. Rockstar could get its boating missions in using the Great Lakes, with a good dispersal of urban and rural areas between the two cities. Unfortunately there's not a lot of terrain to conquer in the Midwest, but there wasn't much in GTA IV in Liberty City (a stand-in for NYC), or in GTA: Vice City, which was a representation of Miami.
Rumors have the game either going to London, which has a rich history of organized crime, or back to Miami for a Vice City redux. There's also one saying GTA 6 will be played between Vice City (Miami), Liberty City (NYC), and Los Santos, a stand-in for Los Angeles. The latest one, and most believable, is calling the game GTA: Project Americas with locations in both South America and North America, and over decades of time.
When will Grand Theft Auto 6 be released?
GTA games are on a longer cycle than your average Madden or Call of Duty titles, with more than five years between releases. It can do this because of its juggernaut status, with GTA V the second-biggest-selling game ever with 120 million copies moved—at 60 bucks a pop. It also has another mega-series in Red Dead Redemption that pours in more money to the company. Minecraft is the No. 1 of all time, by the way.
It has now been almost seven years since GTA V, so even working slowly, we should be close to a new game. The story is completed, according to a French fan site, even before Rockstar lost producer and voice actor Dan Houser. The next PlayStation and Xbox are coming out at the end of this year, which is how Rockstar did it last time. The game went on sale as the PS4 was released. It could also be exclusive to PlayStation for a time, before trickling down to Xbox and PC. Other rumors have Grand Theft Auto 6 arriving as late as fall 2021 or early 2022.
What's the storyline for Grand Theft Auto 6?
A now deleted rumor from Reddit said that with the Project Americas title, the game would be centered around a protagonist who starts as a low-level drug runner before going on to bigger things. It could draw a lot of inspiration from Netlflix's Narcos series, incorporating a fictional Rio de Janeiro, fictional Miami, and fictional New York City. If it were between the "American" cites of Vice, Liberty, and Los Santos, well, the story would probably be the same. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends, at the end your main character is richer for the experience?
What about the cars in Grand Theft Auto 6?
Here's where things get murky, because the answer to that question depends on both the location and the time period. If GTA 6 plays in chapters, as one of the rumors states, we could see cars from as early as the '60s up to the '80s or '90s. And that time-passing mechanic does seem like a believable new wrinkle to throw in for the sixth installment. Each successive game seems to have at least one new big gameplay feature.
It would make sense if your character started out in South America with cheaper, less powerful cars and progressed into the U.S. in the '80s with our fancy cars and adult cocaine habits. I'm imagining Fiats and Fords and Volkswagens in the early chapters, with maybe a Puma GTE thrown in for fun. Later we'd be talking about '80s cars popular in America—so potentially representations of Mustangs, Camaros, Cadillacs and BMWs, along with stand-ins for the Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari Testarossa. Rockstar doesn't use licensed cars in its games, for obvious and violent reasons (automakers don't want players mowing down pedestrians in their vehicles, surprise).
And that's really all we have. A few months ago there was a rumor that we'd hear something new on March 25, but that has come and gone. Many fans are following the Twitter profiles of the voice actors for clues, with no luck. Just chop together a quick trailer, Rockstar! We'll take anything!
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