GTA 6 Game Informer Cover Story: What Drops Sept 29

Game Informer has put Grand Theft Auto VI on the cover of issue 382, and the digital version goes live on Tuesday 29 September. Inside is a 14-page story built on interviews with several Rockstar lead designers, plus 12 screenshots the magazine calls new and exclusive. We're labelling this Reported. Game Informer announced it, and we found no post from Rockstar itself. The details of the story stay unverified until you can read it.

What Game Informer announced

The cover reveal ran on 25 September, written by senior associate editor Marcus Stewart. Game Informer's own announcement sets out the package:

• A 14-page cover story with exclusive interview quotes from Rockstar lead designers.
• 12 new, exclusive screenshots "showing off more of Grand Theft Auto VI's sights and citizens".
• Original cover art "courtesy of Rockstar Games" with Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos.
• The digital version on 29 September. The print issue reaches subscribers and bookstores or newsstands "in the coming weeks".

RockstarINTEL and Push Square both carried the same details. As far as we can tell, they're all working from Game Informer's announcement, not from a Rockstar statement.

The three topics Stewart says he covered

Stewart calls them "never-before-shared features". The first is advanced weather systems "that simulate Florida's less sunny weather phenomena". The second is "the staggering amount of wildlife – native and otherwise – roaming Leonida on land, air, and sea". The third is how Rockstar researched Miami and Florida to make its version feel accurate.

That is a topic list, not a feature list. Some write-ups add tropical storms to the weather line. Game Informer's announcement doesn't name a storm type, so treat that as a guess until the story is out.

Questions the announcement doesn't answer:

• Whether the weather is scripted or simulated, and whether a storm can change how a mission plays.
• Which animals you can meet, and whether you can interact with them or only avoid them.
• Whether any of it ties into the map beyond Vice City. Our Leonida setting guide lists the six regions Rockstar's own site confirms.

Why this one is worth taking seriously

Game Informer isn't a random account with a screenshot. It's a magazine that says it talked to Rockstar's designers and got Rockstar-supplied cover art. In August it carried the Extended Look date that then held, which we covered in our Extended Look start-time post.

It also has some history with GTA fans. In May its redacted cover teaser led a lot of people to expect GTA 6, and the cover turned out to be The Blood of Dawnwalker. Push Square wrote up the disappointment at the time. This time the announcement names the game.

How to read it

Game Informer's page points readers to a print subscription, which it says delivers the GTA 6 issue as the first one. A subscription is 10 issues a year, delivered in the U.S. and, per the magazine, now in more than 50 countries. The page also says the GTA 6 issue will only be available for a limited time.

What it doesn't spell out is whether the 29 September digital version needs a paid subscription. Prices also differ between write-ups, so we're not quoting one. Check Game Informer's own subscribe page on the day.

Print takes longer. Game Informer says only "in the coming weeks". The collectibles site Resell Calendar reports that newsstand copies should start appearing in October, that a new subscriber's first issue can take four to six weeks to arrive, and that stores such as Barnes & Noble, Books a Million and GameStop are expected to stock it. That is one outlet's reading, not a Game Informer commitment. If you want to read the story soon, the digital version is the only route with a fixed date.

What to ignore until 29 September

Between now and then, any post claiming to have "the full text" or "scans" of the story is unverified, and magazine pages are easy to fake. We won't link scans of the issue. If you want to know how to spot the fakes, our leak-checking explainer covers it.

None of this package is a leak. By the magazine's own account, the interviews and cover art come from Game Informer's cooperation with Rockstar. Once the issue is out, we'll only describe what the magazine and Rockstar have made public.

What changes on 29 September

Once the story is readable, we'll check the weather and wildlife claims against quotes and screenshots, then fold what holds up into our running list of confirmed GTA 6 facts. If Rockstar posts about the issue itself, this item moves from Reported to Confirmed. Launch is 54 days away on 19 November, and the countdown keeps the live clock.