As GTA 4 turns 17, ex-Rockstar technical lead says that if GTA 6 was his baby, he “wouldn’t release any additional trailers” because it’s a “boss move”

We still don’t know GTA 6’s exact release date, and even the endless cries for Rockstar to release a second trailer feel like they’ve died down from their moon-obsessed peak. Take-Two’s been pretty open about this radio silence being a part of its plans, and now one of GTA 4’s key devs has said that not only does he reckon those plans are the right call, if it were up to him, GTA 6 wouldn’t get a second trailer at all.

The dev in question, long-time Rockstar technical lead Obbe Vermeij, has said a fair amount of stuff about the studio’s latest release over the past couple of years, and it’s come up again as he’s posted to celebrate the 17th anniversary of GTA 4’s release.

“The original release date was October 16, 2007, in time for Christmas,” he recalled about Niko Bellic’s LC odyssey, which ended up debuting on console on April 29, 2008, “We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007.

“Only at that time did it become clear we were going to miss the deadline. I’m guessing decision-day for VI will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take-Two’s August earnings report.”

As ever, Vermeij made it clear that he’s got no inside info on GTA 6, having left Rockstar nine months after GTA 4 came out. Though, that didn’t stop him offering his view as to what he’d do if he was in control of this latest release.

“If it was my call I wouldn’t release any additional trailers,” he wrote, “There is more than enough hype around VI and the element of surprise is going to make the release only bigger as an event.” Replying to a fan suggesting that just dropping a release date and nothing else would make everyone’s head explode, the dev added: “It would be a boss move.”

While waiting until right before release before suddenly going all-in on the GTA 6 marketing is pretty much confirmed to be Rockstar’s plan, as I alluded to earlier, not bothering with any more trailers as part of that ambush is an interesting take. After all, it’s one of the most obvious to actually put that release date news out there, unless you favour a simple social media graphic or newswire post.

All will certainly do the trick, but it would be Rockstar deciding not to bother taking another crack at decimating YouTube view records – that being the exact kind of thing execs typically love to be able to boast about.

We’ll have to see how it goes, but whatever happens, GTA 6’ll be a massive all-consuming meteor blast that other studios have already planned to avoid having their games blown away by.