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Whereas most folk are determined to know when Rockstar Video games will launch Grand Theft Auto 6 after teasing a 2025 window within the extremely anticipated Recreation’s first trailer, I’ve spent all day attempting to reply a a lot totally different query: When the heck does GTA 6 truly happen?
It’s clear that Grand Theft Auto 6, like its predecessors within the widespread open-world franchise, attracts inspiration from popular culture of each type. Within the trailer, a middle-aged white lady is uncovered for wielding hammers in a more-than-likely racist “protection” of her neighborhood. Women twerk in strip golf equipment, whereas having fun with the seaside and even on high of rushing automobiles. Somebody releases an alligator at a gasoline station. A closely inked felony’s implicative tattoos result in his arrest. Pharmaceutical corporations use cute mascots to promote antidepressants. GTA holds a mirror as much as nearly every part of its second — however what’s the second?
All of the trailer’s snippets have real-life analogues starting from the late 2010s to the early 2020s, which signifies Grand Theft Auto 6 most likely takes place at a time when Vice Metropolis’s society most carefully matched our personal trendy historical past. Social media specifically is so ubiquitous in each the Recreation’s actuality and our personal lives that it’s arduous to see it going down at some other time.
A extra substantial trace is hidden elsewhere. Throughout a scene of Grand Theft Auto 6 protagonist Lucia holding cash within the passenger seat of a automobile, it’s doable to make out the serial quantity on a $20 invoice. The distinctive identifier, noticed by GTAForums consumer utopiadeferred, begins with an S. Evaluating this element in opposition to how we all know foreign money works in the true world, Lucia’s money might need been produced someday after 2021, which is when the present manufacturing line began utilizing a Q.
Then once more, your entire serial quantity (“SA 04101998”) apparently additionally appeared on an outsized $100 invoice ornament in Grand Theft Auto On-line, so it’s doable it’s simply an homage to the 12 months of Rockstar’s founding.
However setting every part else apart, I feel I’ve developed a a lot easier principle about Grand Theft Auto 6’s timeline. It takes place in 2025. Why? As a result of that’s the 12 months it launches in our world.
Let’s have a look at earlier video games within the collection. Grand Theft Auto, the top-down crime simulator that began all of it, debuted in 1997 and came about in 1997. Issues get just a little fuzzy with Grand Theft Auto 2 (launched in 1999 with a decidedly unsure time-frame) and Grand Theft Auto 3 (launched in 2003 however came about in 2001), which I’ll admit isn’t an important search for my speculation, however each Recreation since 2008 has adopted the sample set by the primary.
Grand Theft Auto 4? 2008. Grand Theft Auto 5? 2013. Heck, even the drug trade-focused spin-off Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is about in 2009, the identical 12 months it arrived on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Transportable. And most discrepancies may be defined away by video games within the collection typically specializing in iconic eras in American historical past: Grand Theft Auto: Vice Metropolis and its handheld prequel Vice Metropolis Tales are supposed to evoke the neon aesthetics of the Nineteen Eighties, whereas Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was modeled after inner-city gang tradition of the Nineteen Nineties.
The primary style of a brand new Grand Theft Auto can work on an individual. I scoured the trailer body by body, looking for connections between its references to real-world occasions and squinting at each little bit of textual content I may discover for any clue to the Recreation’s timeframe. Rockstar Video games, for its half, is being just a little coy by not denoting a 12 months throughout in-Recreation conditions the place it could sometimes be included, like police physique cam footage and social media posts.
But when Grand Theft Auto 6 is actually set in 2025, I count on ham-fisted jokes about ugly, self-driving vehicles that kill their drivers as a lot as they do pedestrians and a conspicuously orange politician with foolish hair. Then we’ll know all too nicely when it takes place.
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