Take-Two CEO's reaction to GTA 6's second delay: 'You're kidding'
Rockstar publishing head Jennifer Kolbe told Bloomberg that Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick asked if she was kidding when she called about GTA 6's second delay.
Confirmed. Rockstar Games or Take-Two said this on the record.
When Rockstar needed to push GTA 6 back a second time, the person who had to tell Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick was Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing. By her account he didn't take it well. In a long Bloomberg report on Rockstar published on October 14, Kolbe remembered his reply on that call: "You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding." Kotaku and GamesRadar+ both covered the report.
The disbelief didn't last. Kolbe said that once they had walked Zelnick through the reasons, "he got it." She added that Rockstar was "really lucky that he is as reasonable as he is."
Two calls, two new dates
Kolbe made the call twice. The first was to move GTA 6 out of its original fall 2025 window to May 2026, a delay Rockstar announced in May 2025. A few months later she had to ring him again, this time to move the game from May to November 2026. That second call is the one that drew the "please tell me you're kidding" reply.
According to Kotaku's summary of the Bloomberg piece, Rockstar's leadership really did believe 2025 was achievable when the game was revealed in December 2023, although some developers further down the chain weren't so sure. Rob Nelson, co-studio head and head of development at Rockstar North, explained how the decision got made. "You feel a huge pressure and obligation to deliver the highest-quality game in the most aggressive time scale that you can," he told Bloomberg. The team kept checking progress as it went and, once it was close, had to decide whether the target date was still realistic. (Nelson has been talking a lot this autumn, including in LOVE magazine's GTA 6 feature.)
Why the delays didn't turn into a crunch to ship
Kolbe compared the outcome with what she sees elsewhere in the industry. She said plenty of executives would simply tell a team to work out how to ship on time. That happens to a lot of studios, she said, "and we've all played those games. It's not great."
Zelnick's own comments to Bloomberg, as quoted by Kotaku, sound like a publisher at peace with the extra spending. He described giving developers more time as usually a "wise investment in time" if it lets a game reach the level of quality it's capable of.
For players, this is the clearest look yet at how the two delays happened. The extra year came from Rockstar's own developers deciding the game wasn't ready, and the parent company agreed to it, even if the CEO needed a moment first. It also fits what other Rockstar staff have been saying lately: Phil Hooker has said the game was still changing weeks before launch, and Aaron Garbut has talked about the pressure to beat fan expectations.
What's next
GTA 6 is due on November 19, 2026, and nothing in the Bloomberg report points to any more movement. Rockstar is already looking ahead, too. GamesRadar+ notes the studio says the tools and the team built during this project will let it "do things more quickly" in the future. Rockstar hasn't given any timeline or details for its next game, so for now that is a statement of intent and not a plan anyone can measure.
