The "Before GTA 6" meme (also catalogued as "We Got X Before GTA 6") is a phrasal-template internet joke that crystallised in late 2022 and early 2023 to ridicule the unusually long gap between Grand Theft Auto V (September 2013) and Grand Theft Auto VI (Grokipedia, 2025). The format is endlessly remixable: a user appends almost any real-world event, personal milestone or pop-culture release to the suffix "...before GTA 6", with the punchline carried entirely by the absurd elapsed time since Rockstar's previous mainline entry (Pallav, 2026). This report catalogues the principal variations of the meme and identifies its documented high-water marks across platforms and prediction markets.
The canonical phrasing is "X happened before GTA 6," typically rendered as a white-on-black Impact-font image macro, but the template has proliferated into several distinct sub-formats (Grokipedia, 2025):
Content-wise, four thematic veins dominate the meme corpus:
A notable meta-variant is "GTA 6 won awards before GTA 6 released," referencing the game's "Most Anticipated" wins at The Game Awards 2024 and the Golden Joystick Awards prior to launch (Pallav, 2026).
The meme registered two documented viral peaks. The first arrived on 5 December 2023 with the debut of GTA VI Trailer 1, which amassed over 93 million YouTube views in 24 hours and triggered a worldwide flood of variations on TikTok, X and Reddit (Grokipedia, 2025). The second spike followed Take-Two Interactive's May 2024 announcement narrowing the window to Fall 2025, a perceived delay that produced compilation videos garnering millions of views and high-engagement reposts from major gaming and humour accounts (Grokipedia, 2025). A third cultural inflection came when Polymarket launched a dedicated "What will happen before GTA VI?" prediction market and a broader GTA VI predictions hub, effectively monetising the meme's timeline-comparison logic and signalling its escape from fandom into mainstream internet speculation (BeforeGTAVI, 2026). The eventual confirmation of a 19 November 2026 launch date did not extinguish the format; instead it produced derivative spin-offs such as "After the GTA 6 trailer" and revived ironic posts comparing the new release window to ongoing world events (BeforeGTAVI, 2026; Grokipedia, 2025).
The "Before GTA 6" meme survived through sheer structural flexibility: any noun, name, election, album, film franchise, scientific discovery or personal life-event can be inserted into its slot and still land. Its variations span historical, personal, generational, pop-cultural and meta layers, and its high-water marks (the December 2023 trailer, the May 2024 delay confirmation, and Polymarket's market launch) mark it as one of the defining gaming memes of the 2020s.
BeforeGTAVI (2026) Before GTA VI Meme Explained: Why "We Got X Before GTA 6" Took Over the Internet. Available at: https://beforegtavi.com/news/before-gta-vi-meme-explained.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Grokipedia (2025) Before GTA 6 (meme). Available at: https://grokipedia.com/page/Before_GTA_6_meme (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Pallav, R. (2026) 'We got X before GTA 6: Exploring the meme and some of its best examples', Sportskeeda, 4 May. Available at: https://www.sportskeeda.com/gta/we-got-x-gta-6-exploring-meme-best-examples (Accessed: 14 May 2026).