What year does Grand Theft Auto 6 take place in?
While most people are desperate to know when Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto6 After teasing a 2025 window in the highly anticipated game's first trailer, I spent the day trying to answer a very different question: when does GTA6 actually take place?
It's clear that Grand Theft Auto6, like its predecessors in the popular open-world franchise, draws inspiration from all kinds of pop culture. In the trailer, a middle-aged white woman is exposed for wielding hammers in a more than likely racist “defense” of her neighborhood. Ladies twerk in strip clubs, while enjoying the beach and even on top of fast moving cars. Someone releases an alligator at a gas station. A heavily inked criminal's implied tattoos lead to his arrest. Pharmaceutical companies use cute mascots to sell antidepressants. GTA holds up a mirror to just about everything in its moment, but what is the moment?
All clips from the trailer have real-life analogues, ranging from late 2010 to early 2020, indicating Grand Theft Auto6 is likely set at a time when Vice City's society most closely resembles our own modern history. Social media in particular is so ubiquitous in both the reality of the game and in our own lives that it's hard to see this happening at any other time.
A more substantial hint is hidden elsewhere. During a scene of Grand Theft Auto6 protagonist Lucia holding money in the passenger seat of a car, it is possible to read the serial number on a $20 bill. The unique identification, Spotted by GTAForums user utopiadeferredstarts with an S. Comparing this detail to how we know currency works in the real world, Lucia's money could have been produced sometime after 2021, when the current production line started using a Q.
On the other hand, the full serial number also apparently appeared (“SA 04101998”) on an oversized $100 bill embellishment in Grand Theft Auto Onlineso it's possible that it's just a tribute to the year of Rockstar's founding.
But apart from everything else, I think I've developed a much simpler theory about it Grand Theft Auto6's timeline. It's set in 2025. Why? Because that's the year it launches in our world.
Let's take a look at previous games in the series. Grand Theft Autothe top-down crime simulator that started it all debuted in 1997 and took place in 1997. It gets a little vague when Grand Theft Auto 2 (released in 1999 with a decidedly uncertain time frame) and Grand Theft Auto 3 (released in 2003 but took place in 2001), which, I'll admit, isn't a great look for my hypothesis, but every game since 2008 has followed the pattern of the first.
Grand Theft Auto 4? 2008. Grand Theft Auto 5? 2013. Oh well, even the drug trafficking spin-off Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is set in 2009, the same year it was released on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. And most of the discrepancies can be explained by games in the series that often focus on iconic eras in American history: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its portable prequel Vice City Stories are meant to evoke the neon aesthetic of the 1980s, while Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was modeled on the inner-city gang culture of the 1990s.
The first taste of a new Grand Theft Auto can rub off on a person. I searched the trailer frame by frame, trying to find connections between the references to real-world events and squinting at every bit of text I could find for any clue as to the game's time frame. Rockstar Games, in turn, is a bit cautious by not indicating the year during in-game situations where it would normally be included, such as police bodycam footage and social media posts.
But if Grand Theft Auto6 actually takes place in 2025, I expect lame jokes about ugly self-driving trucks that kill their drivers as much as pedestrians and a strikingly orange politician with crazy hair. Then we know all too well when it takes place.