What year does Grand Theft Auto 6 take place in?

polygon.com:

While most folks are desperate to know when Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto 6 after teasing a 2025 window in the highly anticipated game’s first trailer, I’ve spent all day trying to answer a much different question: When the heck does GTA 6 actually take place?

It’s clear that Grand Theft Auto 6, like its predecessors in the popular open-world franchise, draws inspiration from pop culture of every kind. In the trailer, a middle-aged white woman is exposed for wielding hammers in a more-than-likely racist “defense” of her neighborhood. Ladies twerk in strip clubs, while enjoying the beach and even on top of speeding cars. Someone releases an alligator at a gas station. A heavily inked criminal’s implicative tattoos lead to his arrest. Pharmaceutical companies use cute mascots to sell antidepressants. GTA holds a mirror up to just about everything of its moment — but what is the moment?

All the trailer’s snippets have real-life analogues ranging from the late 2010s to the early 2020s, which indicates Grand Theft Auto 6 probably takes place at a time when Vice City’s society most closely matched our own modern history. Social media in particular is so ubiquitous in both the game’s reality and our own lives that it’s hard to see it taking place at any other time.

A more substantial hint is hidden elsewhere. During a scene of Grand Theft Auto 6 protagonist Lucia holding money in the passenger seat of a car, it’s possible to make out the serial number on a $20 bill. The unique identifier, spotted by GTAForums user utopiadeferred, starts with an S. Comparing this detail against how we know currency works in the real world, Lucia’s cash might have been produced sometime after 2021, which is when the current