What if Grand Theft Auto VI launched the way Cyberpunk 2077 did in 2020? A creator called Skill Issue answers it by splicing classic Cyberpunk launch bugs into official GTA 6 trailer footage, T-posing pedestrians, invisible cars, characters sinking through the map, physics having a complete breakdown and pretty much everything that made CD Projekt RED's most recent game the butt of jokes for the entire duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is very funny if only because the signs so far suggest the actual game is unlikely to release in this state.
The edit also works because Cyberpunk 2077 has become a meme at this point. You do not need a caption to know what you are watching. Everyone who followed games in December 2020 remembers the Cyberpunk rollout, the glitch compilations, the refunds, the game pulled from the PlayStation Store for months and a game that pretty much single-handedly forced the entire video game industry to stop pushing incomplete games out the door for the sake of taking advantage of the holiday season.
Drop those same bugs onto Jason and Lucia and the brain fills in the disaster on its own.
However, Rockstar Games has spent years building the opposite reputation. When the studio pushed GTA 6 from May to November 19, its statement said the extra time was to deliver "the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve." Take-Two Interactive boss Strauss Zelnick has said much the same, backing the delay as Rockstar seeking perfection and describing the target as a polished, bug-free launch. Rockstar will never release games to meet deadlines. It ships when it is ready, even if it might reportedly come at the expense of potential crunch.
With that said, an ex-Rockstar developer recently estimated the game was 80 to 90 percent done and likely content-complete, with testing and polish left. The studio has also been expanding its QA team. We have even compared GTA 6's long road against Cyberpunk's shorter one, where a compressed final stretch showed in the results. None of that guarantees a spotless launch, since no game this size ships without a few rough edges, but it is the opposite of the corner-cutting that sank Cyberpunk at release.
To be fair to CD Projekt Red, the Cyberpunk story did not end in 2020. The studio spent years patching the game, overhauled it, won a lot of players back and even earned a well-received expansion. The point of the joke is not that Cyberpunk is bad now. It is that a broken launch is the thing people remember, long after the fixes arrive. It's the kind of reputation hit Rockstar's repeated delays and polish statements suggest it wants to avoid.
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There is an old line that fits here, usually attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto. "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." The Nintendo legend almost certainly never said it in those words. The quote traces back to 1990s industry wisdom but the sentiment is the industry's hard-won common sense. The studio behind Grand Theft Auto has built a career on the first half of the statement. The Skill Issue video is funny precisely because we all know how unlikely the second half is here.
GTA 6 arrives on November 19. If the track record holds, the only T-posing will be in the memes and the eventual mods on a PC version if one is eventually released.
