GTA 6's second delay landed 10 days after a board retreat: how Take-Two's CEO says he took the news

Strauss Zelnick says the request to delay Grand Theft Auto VI a second time reached him 10 days after a Take-Two Interactive board retreat, and that he wasn't thrilled about the timing. He agreed anyway. "This was a must-have," he told a Wall Street Journal audience on Nov. 4, 15 days before the game's Nov. 19 launch.

The Take-Two CEO was speaking with the Journal's Jessica Toonkel at WSJ Tech: California, in a talk that went viral for a different exchange, about hits. His account adds his side to the one Rockstar Games' leaders gave Bloomberg in October. The full video is on YouTube; the details below come from GTA Boom's and GamesRadar's reports on it.

How the news reached him

Toonkel asked whether he freaked out and screamed at Rockstar when it said it needed more time, GTA Boom reported. He said no, but added that he doesn't always feel as calm as he comes across, and that his wife doesn't mean that entirely as a compliment.

The request came from Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, who has worked with him for close to two decades. Bloomberg reported in October that both of GTA 6's delays went through Kolbe, who called Zelnick each time, and that she remembers him meeting the second call with disbelief. Our story on Bloomberg's feature has more from that account.

Why he said yes

Zelnick said decisions like this come up often in creative businesses, and compared them to reshoots in film and re-recording in music. They're hard and expensive, he said, but a company whose mission is to make the best entertainment on Earth sometimes has to accept them. Plenty of companies, he added, have a good mission statement and then act against it when it counts, GamesRadar reported.

He doesn't always agree. He recalled another case at Take-Two where he refused and said the game was shipping, then joked that it was lucky he was right. He has turned a request down outright only once, GTA Boom reported, and this one was different: to him, the extra time wasn't something that would merely be nice to have.

The release he wouldn't name

Zelnick said people forget what happens when a company sticks to a schedule and ships no matter what. Without naming a competitor, he pointed to a very high-profile release in recent years that shipped and then had to be pulled.

GamesRadar and PC Guru took that as a reference to Cyberpunk 2077, which was pulled from the PlayStation Store about a week after its launch in December 2020. Zelnick didn't name the game, so that's their reading. GamesRadar adds that many updates later, Cyberpunk turned its reputation around.

GTA 6's delays so far

Rockstar said the second delay would let it finish the game with the level of polish players expect, and it hasn't moved the date since. Pre-load opens Nov. 10, and our pre-load guide has the details. The release date guide traces every change to the date, and our guide to how long GTA 6 took to make has the full timeline.