Rockstar Just Revealed When GTA 6 Unlocks — And the New Zealand Trick Survived

Rockstar finally dropped the exact worldwide unlock times for GTA 6 — and buried in the fine print is the best news console players have heard since 2013: the ancient New Zealand region trick still works. Flip your console's timezone, and you're roaming Vice City almost a full day before your friends. Twelve years of waiting, and the loopholes made it out alive.

Here's how the rollout actually shakes out: New Zealand goes live Monday night local time, Europe follows Tuesday around 11 PM, and North America — home of the biggest GTA audience on the planet — waits until early Wednesday morning.

GTA 6 DualSense controller with the palm-tree VI logo over a synthwave sunset

The hardware's ready for launch night. That's the GTA 6 DualSense — and yes, it'll be sold out before the unlock timer hits zero.

Lucia and Jason in bandana masks and sunglasses outside a store in GTA 6

Lucia and Jason are set to carry the biggest entertainment launch of the decade — presumably with better planning than the guy choosing between sleep and a midnight unlock.

Lucia dancing in a neon-lit nightclub in GTA 6

Somewhere in Vice City, someone's already dancing like it's launch night. Honestly? Fair.

A gunman silhouetted against the Vice City night skyline in GTA 6

And if waiting isn't your thing — that time-zone trick is apparently still sitting there, unpatched, a decade after someone discovered it. Rockstar fixed everything else. Apparently not that.

▶️ The full 60-second breakdown is in the video above — unlock times, the trick, and how to use it responsibly. Kind of.

Source: Eurogamer