By September 17, 2013. I remember standing at the shelf with the box and thinking about the reviews I’d read at three in the morning. GTA 5 turned out to be very good — and I still walked around for a week missing the San Andreas spirit, the gym, the dates, the food. Somewhere around then I decided the sixth one would fix all of it. Today that game turns thirteen, and the sixth one is sixty-three days away.
The numbers GTA 5 racked up still read like a typo. Take-Two’s last count puts it past 230 million copies, and it has been shipping around five million more every quarter — a game older than some of the kids playing it. Back in October 2013 Guinness handed it seven world records at once: best-selling game in its first 24 hours, fastest game to a billion dollars, biggest launch-day revenue of any entertainment product in history — movies included. Guinness editor-in-chief Craig Glenday said at the time that games had simply stopped being a niche hobby. GTA 5 was the receipt.
The wild part is that the record-setting launch turned out to be the smaller half of the story. GTA Online carried this game across three console generations, and the heists people ran with strangers in 2015 are half the reason a GTA 6 multiplayer is treated as a given. Thirteen years of one game staying in the charts — nobody in this industry has done that, and I say this as someone who has spent eleven of those years making games.
So happy birthday to the old champion. Its successor arrives on November 19, and every sales record on that Guinness list is openly up for grabs. I was at the shelf in 2013. This time I’ll be the guy refreshing the preload screen — the countdown is already uncomfortably short.