Time Is Wild: GTA Gaps Are Getting Ridiculous

It honestly hit me the other day just how insane this timeline is. We are in 2026, the year that Grand Theft Auto VI is finally supposed to drop. After all the waiting, all the speculation, all the memes… it’s actually here.

But then you zoom out for a second—and that’s when it gets kinda crazy.

Back in 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV came out. That doesn’t feel like that long ago in gaming terms… but in just two years, it’ll be 2028. That’s 20 years since GTA IV released.

Twenty.

Years.

And then it gets even wilder.

In 2013, Grand Theft Auto V dropped. That game has basically lived across entire console generations. People who played it in high school are full grown adults now. And yet somehow, it still feels recent because it never really went away.

But do the math: from 2026, go forward just 7 years… and you land in 2033.

2033 will mark 20 years since GTA V.

Let that sink in for a second.

We are literally at a point where the gap between GTA releases has gotten so massive that both of the previous mainline games will be 20 years old within less than a decade. That’s not normal. That’s not how this series used to work.

There used to be a time when GTA games dropped consistently:

GTA III → Vice City → San Andreas → GTA IV
It felt like we were always getting something new, always evolving, always moving forward.

Now?

We’ve basically lived through an entire era where Rockstar Games has stretched one game—GTA V—across multiple generations, platforms, and years to the point where it almost warped our sense of time.

And I’m not even saying GTA VI won’t be worth it. It probably will be massive, detailed, and groundbreaking.

But still… it’s just wild to think about.

We went from a franchise that defined rapid evolution in gaming… to one where the gaps are so long that entire decades pass between major entries.

Like seriously—how are we already approaching a world where: