While the hottest Grand Theft Auto rumors all concern the unannounced but confirmed 6th main game, GTA 6, that isn't the only potentially upcoming title in the franchise that we may be getting in the coming years without yet knowing. The newest alleged scoop surfacing on GTAForums suggests that Rockstar may be remastering the three classic titles of the 3D era: GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas.
This particular rumor has somewhat more footing than the recent fan theory concerning GTA 6 and the upcoming Super Bowl 55, we're still skeptical. A GTAForums admin, Mach1bud, is the source this time around, posting some vague messages about knowing insider info they cannot share, but have spoken about in the past and are 'glad it's happening sooner rather than later', whatever it may be.
Revealing that, at least seemingly, was an image later posted by a GTAForums admin on Twitter. It contained a set of custom-made physical Shark Cards — the in-game currency microtransactions used in GTA Online — with a string of numbers and letters where the card number should be. This read "2001200220042013B46".
As is to be expected from the GTA fandom, these posts triggered a collaborative effort to unveil what exactly was being rumored here. Some online detective work later, posters concluded that the card number is a string of years, referring to the initial release year of GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA 5. The final portion means "before 6", according to this theory.
This would suggest that there may be remasters in the works for the 3D era titles, which are planned to launch before the next main entry in the series, if the sleuthing is to be believed. There is, however, no official source or even any kind of leaked information that could be verified that corroborates this conclusion. For all we know, this is GTAForums staff having a bit of fun with a hoax. The custom made physical Shark Cards in particular seem like an elaborate prank is being played.
The 3D era games are classics, and part of the reason why GTA remains such a titan of the market even today. Before GTA 3, the series was fairly successful and popular, but nowhere near blockbuster status. It was games like Vice City and San Andreas that eternally cemented its place in gaming history. While these titles have been re-released on a multitude of platforms by Rockstar, true remasters have never been released before.
We're not discounting the possibility of this happening, simply calling the veracity of the current rumors into question — that said, we'd love to be wrong here, and hope that remasters of these classic masterpieces do get made!
