Hype about “Grand Theft Auto VI”
Exciting facts about the “GTA” series
Palm trees, beach, sea: The “GTA” series returns to Vice City.
© Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive Software
“GTA VI” has been on everyone’s lips since its record-breaking first trailer. You should know these facts about the hype game.
Fans of the series have been waiting for the day when Rockstar Games would announce “Grand Theft Auto VI” for more than ten years. Last week the time had come: the most anticipated video game in history should be playable on consoles from 2025. With the Publisher Rockstar set a new record with around 90 million views on the first day of the announcement trailer. And there is even more story behind the success of the gangster series. These are some facts about the “GTA” series.
The production of the blockbuster “GTA V” cost around $270 million. But Rockstar had recouped this amount through pre-orders alone. To date, “GTA V” is the second best-selling video game in history. More than 190 million copies were sold between the 2013 release and the end of 2023. GTA only loses out to “Minecraft,” which has sold more than 300 million games since this year.
In total, the “GTA” series includes 18 titles so far. The main games “GTA” to “GTA VI” are joined by a dozen expansions and spin-offs. Among them are the extremely popular and successful “GTA San Andreas” (2002) and “Vice City” (2004), which particularly cemented the cult status of the series in the 2000s. The latter sold 30 million copies and was, at the time, both the most popular game in Rockstar history and the best-selling game on the Playstation 2.
Cult status thanks to celebrities, records and grippingly told stories
The storytelling became more complex from title to title. “GTA V” already had more than 80,000 spoken lines of dialogue without any later additional content. Since the release in 2013, there has been more and more new content, especially for “GTA Online”. Over time, Voicelines also repeatedly spoke to celebrities who had guest appearances in the series either as themselves or in a specific role: among them Michael Madsen (66) in “GTA 3”, Ricky Gervais (62) in “GTA 4 “, Phil Collins (72) in “Vice City”, Ice T (65) in “San Andreas” or Dr. Dre (58) in “GTA Online”.
The developers at Rockstar North shot the record bird in 2013 with the release of “GTA 5”. Til today leads The Guinness Book of Records named it the entertainment product that made the most profit in the first 24 hours, a whopping $815.7 million. Two days later, Rockstar broke the billion dollar mark. It will be exciting to see whether you can knock yourself off the throne with “GTA VI”, after all, the game will initially only be released for consoles that are currently not at a comparable level of distribution as their predecessors from 2013. Because, in particular, the sales figures of the Playstation 5 has picked up strongly recently, it could still be something with the further records. The hype is certainly big enough.