Where the meme came from
The format is older than the hype. Know Your Meme, which lists "We Got X Before GTA 6" as a confirmed snowclone, traces scattered jokes on Twitter and Reddit to the years before 2023. The oldest example it links to is a tweet from June 2020.
The joke broke out in the summer of 2023. On 26 July 2023, former US Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified about UFOs at a US House hearing. The next day, 27 July, TikTok user @jadendunn posted a video joking that "we got aliens before GTA 6". Know Your Meme counts it among the first notable examples of the format. The video passed 260,000 plays within a year.
From there the line spread through TikTok, Reddit and X comments. Rockstar's first trailer on 4 December 2023 named a 2025 release window and gave the joke fresh fuel. By 10 December 2023 people were already posting ironic versions of it, which Know Your Meme reads as a sign that the joke was everywhere. Know Your Meme added its own entry on 23 April 2024.
Why GTA 6 became a unit of time
Mostly because of the gap. GTA V came out on 17 September 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360. Instead of a sequel, players got the same game three more times: on PS4 and Xbox One (18 November 2014), on PC (14 April 2015) and on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S (15 March 2022).
The road to GTA 6, in dates:
- 4 February 2022. Rockstar confirms that development is "well underway".
- 4 December 2023. Trailer 1 arrives a day early after a leak and promises 2025.
- 2 May 2025. The game moves from fall 2025 to 26 May 2026 (Take-Two press release).
- 6 May 2025. Trailer 2 gets 475 million views across platforms in 24 hours.
- 6 November 2025. Second delay, to 19 November 2026 (Take-Two quarterly results).
- 25 June 2026. Pre-orders open.
- 12 November 2026. Pre-loading starts.
- 19 November 2026. Release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
From GTA V to GTA VI: 4,811 days, or 13 years, 2 months and 2 days. Someone born on GTA V launch day turns 13 two months before GTA 6 comes out.
When a wait gets that long, it stops being a date and becomes a yardstick. Any real event can be measured against it, and the punchline writes itself.
The best-known examples
Our full dated list has more than 150 real events from 17 September 2013 to today, each with a date and a source. These are the ones people quote most:
- A new Pope. Cardinals elected Leo XIV on 8 May 2025.
- A new Nintendo console. Switch 2 launched on 5 June 2025.
- People flying around the Moon. Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026.
- Aliens, sort of. A US House hearing on UFOs on 26 July 2023.
- A second moon. Earth held on to asteroid 2024 PT5 from 29 September to 25 November 2024.
- A total solar eclipse across North America on 8 April 2024.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong, released on 4 September 2025.
- ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 and GPT-5 on 7 August 2025.
- A rocket booster caught by its own launch tower on 13 October 2024.
- Twitter turning into X on 24 July 2023.
- Barbenheimer on 21 July 2023.
- GTA 6 itself: two delays and three big videos before the game.
Events marked as meme classics are the ones that well-known roundups of the meme (Know Your Meme, GTA Intel, Den of Geek) use as examples.
What we leave out: tragedies, wars, disasters and deaths. Plenty of history happened in those 13 years, but this joke only works when nobody gets hurt.
What happens to the meme after 19 November 2026
Once GTA 6 is out, "before GTA 6" stops being a prediction and turns into history. Here is what we expect. It's a forecast, not a fact:
- "Before GTA 6 on PC". As of 12 October 2026, Rockstar has announced only PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions. GTA V took 574 days to reach PC. Red Dead Redemption 2 took 375 days, from 26 October 2018 to 5 November 2019.
- "Before GTA 7". The joke can simply move up a number.
- Nostalgia. "Remember when we got X before GTA 6?"
We will update this page on launch day.