On June 2nd, a Reddit user going by “then_Pomegranate625” posted an acoustic chart measuring decibel levels outside Rockstar Games’ headquarters in New York. The chart showed a spike from 60 dB at baseline to significantly higher readings around 11 a.m. His conclusion: morning tea had been organized, executives were gathering, and GTA 6 Trailer 3 was imminent.
He was wrong about the trailer. The methodology is where it gets interesting.
The Full Research Program, In Order
Over the course of approximately two weeks, then_Pomegranate625 built out a surveillance infrastructure that would make a mid-budget private detective proud and a civil liberties lawyer nervous. The complete list of data points he tracked, in sequence:
He started with acoustics. A microphone rig installed outside the building measured decibel levels around the clock. A spike on June 2nd, he explained, indicated more people arriving — specifically, he believed, for morning tea ahead of a major announcement. He noted that “11 a.m. sounds go up. I believe that’s Rockstar most likely inviting people for morning tea to celebrate the soon release of Trailer 3.” It could also, he acknowledged, be someone’s birthday.
When the acoustic rig went missing — taken, he later clarified, by “a random person apparently” who he suspects tried to pawn it — he pivoted to vehicle traffic analysis. He spent two nights photographing every car entering and leaving the Rockstar parking lot, estimating vehicle values, and flagging the arrival of a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. His reasoning: a half-million-dollar car in the employee lot implies an executive. An executive implies a meeting. A meeting implies an announcement.
Simultaneously, he began tracking oxygen levels. Decreased O2 concentration on weekends, he argued, meant more people were in the building breathing through the air. Executives working weekend hours. Stress and excitement consuming additional oxygen. Trailer 3 incoming.
Then he started counting cigarettes. “Compared to the coffees, tracking cigarettes is better to show stress,” he posted. The average cigarette consumption for a consumer sits around 15 per day. He counted 71 over 19 hours outside the headquarters, with 11 cars present. “This is an insanely high amount of cigarettes present around the HQ. Stress levels are clearly high.”
Finally, he started cataloguing shoe brands. “I also counted the types of shoes on the individuals entering. A couple I didn’t recognize, but a couple Hugo Boss and RM Williams stand out. It signals executive presence if you ask me.”
Pulling all data streams together, he published his prediction: GTA 6 Trailer 3 was dropping that coming week.
What Actually Happened
No trailer dropped. Law enforcement made contact.
His final post read: “I won’t be stopped. Hi everyone. A little FYI — I’ve had to change my tracking methods. Law enforcement has gotten in contact with me about a couple of things. They’ve given me direction on what would be okay and what wouldn’t. So far so good. I have a pretty cool update tomorrow.”
There was no update the next day. There have been no posts since. His account, which was one week old and had 98 contributions entirely within r/GTA6Unmoderated, went silent.
Whether Rockstar’s legal team made a call, whether law enforcement followed through, or whether then_Pomegranate625 simply decided the whole thing had run its course is unknown. The RM Williams shoe data was never published.
The Actual GTA 6 Timeline, For Reference
GTA 6 has a confirmed release date of November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed on an earnings call that the game will not be delayed again — a statement confident enough that Take-Two projected $8 to $8.2 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2027 on the basis of that launch date. PC release date has not been announced; Rockstar is following the same console-first pattern used for GTA V.
Trailer 3 is expected sometime between late June and mid-July 2026, based on Zelnick’s statement that the marketing campaign begins in “early summertime.” Pre-orders are expected to open alongside the trailer. Rockstar has not confirmed a date and has not posted anything about GTA 6 since Trailer 2 dropped on May 6, 2025 — a silence of over 13 months as of this writing.
That 13-month silence is, directly, why then_Pomegranate625 was outside the building counting cigarettes at midnight.
Why This Happened
Rockstar Games operates with a marketing strategy that functions less like a traditional game launch and more like an Apple product reveal — controlled, infrequent, and engineered specifically to make the absence of information feel like an event. Trailer 1 dropped in December 2023. Trailer 2 dropped in May 2025, seventeen months later. Every GTA Online double XP weekend in between prompted the same cycle: community excitement, Rockstar silence, collective disappointment.
The GTA community has developed increasingly elaborate prediction systems to fill the vacuum Rockstar created. Star charts. Parking lot reconnaissance. Acoustic monitoring. Oxygen concentration. Shoe brand identification. These are not signs of a community that has lost its mind — they are signs of a community that has been starved of information for so long that any signal, however weak, feels like it’s worth analyzing.
The Washington Pizza Index — the informal theory that unusually high pizza delivery orders to government buildings at 2 a.m. signal something significant happening inside — at least has the plausible mechanism of human beings needing food. The oxygen concentration method requires executives to be breathing unusually hard in an outdoor area that also happens to be near a Reddit user with an O2 sensor.
Then_Pomegranate625 was almost certainly doing a bit. The acoustics chart looked AI-generated. The account was a week old. The shoe brand update reads more like a comedy writer’s draft than a genuine reconnaissance report. But the community of 250,000 people on r/GTA6Unmoderated engaged with it earnestly enough, and the whole arc — microphone installation, data collection, law enforcement contact, immediate silence — played out with the precise narrative structure of someone who was either very committed to the bit or very committed to not getting a restraining order from Rockstar Games.
Either way, Trailer 3 has not dropped. November 19 remains the date. The parking lot is presumably still there.
Sources
- Reddit: r/GTA6Unmoderated Acoustic Surveillance Updates
- IGN: GTA 6 Release Window and Trailer 2 Retrospective
- Take-Two Interactive: Take-Two Q4 2025 Earnings Call Financial Projections
About the Author
Your 28-year-old brother who has been waiting for GTA 6 since 2022, has 100-percented GTA San Andreas twice in the interim, and genuinely considered the oxygen concentration data for about four minutes before deciding it was probably fake.
