Rockstar has released a second trailer for the recently-delayed GTA 6 – and its comments on YouTube are a rollercoaster of joy and existential gloom.
It says a great deal about Rockstar Games’ standing that it can take a dozen years – and counting – to make a sequel to Grand Theft Auto 5 and get away with releasing just two trailers. Yet here we are in May 2025, with GTA 6 having been delayed to May 2026, and the developer behind it has released its second trailer.
Ordinarily, we might expect the release of a promo – instead of, you know, the actual game itself – to be greeted with the internet equivalent of raised pitchforks. Instead, a look at the 300,000+ comments beneath the new GTA 6 trailer on YouTube reveal something else entirely: a mixture of happiness (“Dropping this makes the delay hurt a little less…”), joy (“The best gift we could have been given…”) and outright hyperbole (“At this point, GTA 6 is not a game – it’s an emotional experience).
Overwhelmingly, though, there’s a philosophical air to the comments that borders on existential dread. One much-liked comment reads, “Just need to survive this next year.” Another concurs, “I graduated, got married, had a child, retired and was going to die until this dropped. No dying now boys!”
GTA 6's first trailer, uploaded in December 2023, elicited a similarly melancholic response from a section of its fans. “I’m 47 years old and these guys still get me excited,” one fan wrote at the time. “I’m a grown man and I shed a tear… I’m so thankful I lived to see this.”
Such comments speak not just to what the GTA franchise means to its legions of fans, but also to the extraordinary length of time between sequels. When GTA 5 came out in 2013, the world had yet to experience such things as the global pandemic, the twisting of Twitter into the strange hellscape it is today, and two terms of one Donald J Trump. The gamers that were young and carefree back then are now grown-ups; those old enough to have played the seminal GTA III or even the PlayStation original from 1997 are now into well into middle age.
Bearing all that in mind, it’s perhaps inevitable that a franchise that has long dealt on a ‘get rich or die trying’ sense of youthful abandon might also have its players thinking about their own mortality.
“It’s crazy and sad to think that there are people who are watching this trailer who wont make it to see the game release,” one fan wistfully observes. “Cherish every day you have.”
Enough time has passed between the two trailers, in fact, that there’s a comment dedicated to “those who left us after the first trailer and were looking forward to the game.”
For some fans, GTA 6 is more than just another bit of cultural ephemera; it’s inextricably into their personal histories. As one player puts it, “We’ve truly grown up with this series. What a journey.”
Given all the excitement, and the ongoing talk about mortality and the passing of time, we can only hope that Rockstar doesn’t subjects its open-world crime sim to yet another delay.
GTA 6 is due for release on the 26th May 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Unless it’s delayed again. Please don’t delay it again, Rockstar.
