A former developer at Rockstar has expressed his delight at the many wild conspiracy theories surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6, insisting staff at the studio will be enjoying watching the community go off the deep end.
Rockstar released GTA 6 Trailer 1 to record-breaking viewership in December 2023, but it hasn’t released a single asset in the 12 months since. The year-long wait for more information has fueled increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about when Rockstar will release GTA 6 Trailer 2.
These have included counting the holes in Lucia’s cell door net, the bullet holes in the car from Trailer 1, and even registration plates as they hunt for GTA 6 clues. But chief among the conspiracy theories is GTA 6’s ongoing moon watch, which was, remarkably, proven to have accurately predicted the date Rockstar announced when it would release GTA 6 Trailer 1 last December, but debunked as a hint at the release date for Trailer 2.
Mike York, who worked as an animator at Rockstar New England for six years helping to build Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 before leaving the company in 2017, is a big fan of all the fuss, taking to his YouTube channel to explain that the developers at Rockstar will be getting a kick out of it too.
"All the developers over there are geeking out about it, trust me," he said. "When I was over there I would have little conversations with people and be like, ‘Did you hear this person found this mystery?’ And they’d go, ‘Oh yeah!’ "
York also suggested that Rockstar is playing up to the conspiracy theories, deliberately avoiding saying anything about the game or when Trailer 2 will be released in order to fuel even more speculation within the community.
“They're reaching and pulling and trying to come up with these really cool theories to decipher when the next trailer will be,” he said of fans.
“Specifically Rockstar, they're very secretive about what they do, and this is a really cool tactic because it creates allure and it creates mystery and it creates people talking about it without them having to do anything. The more they're silent the better it is, because the more people will be antsy and want to talk about it and have this feeling of not knowing what's going to happen.”
York went on to say that Rockstar is likely resisting pressure from its army of fans to announce the GTA 6 Trailer 2 release date for this exact reason.
“They could easily release the trailer date and be like, ‘Hey this is when the trailer's coming out,’ but they don't do it. And they don't do it on purpose because it's a really, really good marketing tactic. If you think about it, it creates these really cool theories.
“This brings the fans together. This is a really cool way to get fans to talk about your game when you’re not releasing anything yet, in-between the times.
“All these theories are great. They only create hype, they create talk, they create mystery behind the games.”
Could Rockstar actually be placing clues to things like trailer release dates in GTA Online images, as the moon theory has suggested? Probably not, York said.
“A lot of these things are like trolls,” he added. “It’s a mystery to nowhere. It’s just to have you dig in there and search for stuff and find it. And even though it won’t lead to something, it’s something that can bring a chase and a journey and an adventure for all these players for years to come.
“As a developer, it was really cool to sit down and look at these comments that people leave and these conspiracy theories that they come up with, because a lot of them are super elaborate, and they take a lot of time to come up with. It really goes to show the passion behind all these fans behind this franchise, because these people are taking hours and hours and hours out of their day to try to go after these theories, and it’s really fun.”
It is remarkable that Rockstar has gone a year without following up GTA 6 Trailer 1 with any new information at all. With GTA 6's fall 2025 release window on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S still on the cards, according to Take-Two, you’d expect Rockstar to pipe up sooner rather than later.
While you wait to find out, IGN has much more on GTA 6 to check out, including an ex-Rockstar dev who says the studio probably won’t be able to decide whether GTA 6 is delayed until May 2025, the boss of Take-Two's coy response on whether GTA 6 is coming to PC, and the expert opinion on whether the PS5 Pro will run GTA 6 at 60 frames per second.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
