Do you hear that? The faint sound of thousands of Grand Theft Auto fans going wild online over the latest (possible) GTA 6 conspiracy. This time it involves an odd shirt with a coded message that briefly appeared in GTA Online after the latest update. And while the shirt seems to be gone now, the mystery around it lingers as players online debate what it actually means.
On Tuesday, Rockstar released the latest big, free update for GTA Online—its long-running online open-world crime sim—and while it added some new missions and a cool career tracker, it also angered fans by removing 180+ cars. Then it made folks even madder by bringing some of those cars back behind a paywall. Not great! However, Rockstar’s latest GTA Online update didn’t just anger fans, it confused them, too. That’s because a new shirt and separate in-game texture were discovered that appear to hit at something being revealed in the future.
GTA Online’s strange new mystery shirt
As spotted by GTA Net, a new shirt popped up in stores around Los Santos shortly after the new update went live. The t-shirt was located under a category named “GTA V Anniversary” and was oddly named: ???
On the front of the shirt was a strange image featuring different symbols and numbers. Pretty quickly, players were able to decipher the numbers using a simple online A1Z26 deciphering tool.
The hidden message on the shirt was revealed to say: ONEDAYWILLREVEALALL aka “one day will reveal all.”
Reveal what? Well, of course, fans immediately jumped to Grand Theft Auto 6 and assumed all of this was the first part of a larger ARG or marketing push for the upcoming open-world sequel. (The game officially hasn’t been named yet, so it might not even be called GTA 6.)
Not long after the shirt (and a laptop sporting its own cryptic hidden message) were found, the new mysterious piece of clothing was quietly removed from GTA Online. What’s going on? Is this just another elaborate part of a larger mystery leading to the reveal of GTA 6’s first trailer? Well, maybe, or more likely it’s a teaser for an upcoming Halloween event that went live earlier than Rockstar intended.
Kotaku has reached out to Rockstar about the shirt and its meaning.
The GTA Online shirt is likely teasing a Halloween event, not GTA 6
However, the best theory and explanation for what all this means was provided by Twitter user Gaming Detective. They explained that by digging into the newly updated files in GTA Online you can find references to UFOs and aliens. Dataminers have also discovered an upcoming, new ghost hunt mode, too.
And what month did GTA Online launch? October 2013. (GTA V itself came out in September.) So the new shirt, temporarily located in-game under the category “GTA V Anniversary,” is likely connected to the 10-year anniversary of GTA Online, which would be in October aka spooky month. And in the past Rockstar has done fairly elaborate Halloween-related events.
Plus, a reminder that 99 percent of the time, all of these mysteries and conspiracies involving Rockstar Games and GTA 6 amount to nothing. Add all that up and the reality is that it is very, very unlikely this is all a teaser for the next Grand Theft Auto game. It makes more sense that this is Rockstar teasing a Halloween event, just a little earlier than planned.
Honestly, the best GTA 6 tease we’ve gotten in recent months was from Take-Two Interactive’s earnings report, which projected a massive, historically massive, increase in profits in 2024. That seems to heavily suggest a game on the scale of GTA 6 is coming out next year. So while this shirt mystery is likely a bust, we probably don’t have much longer to wait before Rockstar actually does start teasing its next big game—the first new GTA title in a decade—somewhere and somehow. And GTA players will be waiting to freak out about it the moment it happens.
.
