Two delays, and the record of who called them right
The fourth-delay talk comes from one former employee who says he does not expect a fourth delay. The history underneath it is worth more. When Take-Two denied a slip, the reporters were right.
A fourth delay has not been announced. The date is 19 November 2026, and the talk of it moving again comes from one interview with one person who no longer works at Rockstar.
That person is Mike York, an animator who worked on Grand Theft Auto V. Speaking to Indy100, and carried from there by aggregators, he said:
Straight up, they could delay it again. They can. They can do whatever they want and people will wait right now, it doesn’t matter.
In the same interview he marked his own limits. “I don’t currently work there so I can’t give confidence based off that, but based on my previous experience, they could delay it again.”
Then he posted this on X:
Just so we are clear, I don’t think they will delay it again. But I also said I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
The hedge was there at the source and did not survive the aggregation. It is the same shape as the “$100 GTA 6” story, where a correction ran inside the article that carried the claim and travelled nowhere, which we take apart in how the $100 GTA 6 story happened. York’s second sentence is not travelling either.
So the claim itself is a rumour: one origin, repeated, and the origin does not believe it.
The two delays that did happen
The date has moved twice. The game was announced for 2025. It moved to 26 May 2026. It then moved to 19 November 2026, with polish given as the reason, a week after 34 employees were fired.
Count them yourself, because plenty of coverage says three, and we said three in the headline of this article until we counted: an announced window and two moves away from it is two moves. The third comes from folding in the March 2024 delay report, which was a piece of journalism rather than a change of date. It was also correct, which is the subject of the next section.
None of that forecasts a fourth move. A game that has slipped twice is a game that has slipped twice. That is a history, not a schedule.
The one round that was actually scored
There is one moment in this history where a press report and a corporate statement said opposite things about the same date, and the answer arrived later.
On 22 March 2024, Kotaku and VGC reported that the release could slip to 2026. Take-Two, between March and May 2024, said the game remained on schedule for late 2025.
The corporate side of that round was not a hedge. Asked directly by IGN whether he was concerned the game might be delayed, Take-Two’s chief executive Strauss Zelnick answered: “We do feel highly confident that we’ll deliver [Grand Theft Auto VI] in fall of 2025.” The report carrying it is headlined “GTA 6 Release Date Narrowed to Fall 2025 Amid Questions about Delays”, and it describes the company as “doubling down” on the date “despite rumors of a possible delay into 2026”. We re-read all of that at the source on 12 September 2026.
The reporters were right. The corporate statement was wrong, and it did not miss by a little: the game slipped into 2026 and then slipped again inside it.
That is the one round in the verified part of our register where a Take-Two statement about this release date was scored against the reporting it contradicted. The reporters won it.
The wider scorecard
Widening the frame past the delay question does not change the direction, but it does add the misses, which matter just as much:
- Jason Schreier, Bloomberg, 27 July 2022: two protagonists in a Bonnie and Clyde shape, one of them a Latina. Correct.
- Kotaku and VGC, 22 March 2024: the date could slip to 2026. Correct.
- Take-Two, March to May 2024: on schedule for late 2025. Wrong.
- The Know, 6 March 2018: Vice City, a female lead, “Project Americas”. Three correct. The South America part has never been confirmed.
- Tom Henderson, 1 July 2021: a 2025 release and a Fortnite-style evolving map. The date was partly right. The evolving map has never been confirmed.
- Jason Schreier, 15 April 2020: “a moderately sized release” that would grow over time. Superseded by the scope of the game now shipping.
Reporters beat the corporate statements, and the worst-performing single source in that list is the publisher’s own denial. Reporters also got things wrong, and the misses sit in the same list as the hits.
What the record does not tell you
A track record is a prior, not a source. It says something about how much weight to put on the next denial from Take-Two. It says nothing about whether the build is finished in November, which is the only question that decides a fourth delay, and which nobody outside Rockstar can answer.
The argument on the other side is about behavior rather than access. A studio does not start a marketing push three months before a launch it expects to move. That is an inference drawn from what a company is doing, not a statement about the schedule, and it is labeled that way here.
The useful takeaway is narrow. If Take-Two is asked about a slip in the coming weeks and says the game is on schedule, that sentence has a record of nothing to one, in the verified part of our register, against the reporters who contradicted it last time. One round is a thin basis for anything. It is also more than the fourth-delay claim has.
Nobody knows whether 19 November 2026 holds. The man the current headlines rest on has said in his own words that he does not think it will move. Until Rockstar says otherwise, the date stands, and the case against it is a rumour with one name on it and a denial from that same name.