According to Best Buy's website, the next game in the Grand Theft Auto series (which Best Buy labels The Next Grand Theft Auto) will release on October 1st. EBgames (who labels the game simply as Grand Theft Auto 5) lists the release date as November 29th, a near 2 month discrepancy from the Best Buy release date. Neither gives any indication what the official title really is (Rockstar games recently registered the trademarks for GTA: Bogota, GTA: San Andreas, GTA: Sin City, and GTA: Tokyo).

Nowadays, release dates are often set then broken, planned for and ultimately scrapped, and it can be hard to know when a game is nearing "Gold" status, let alone when it will hit stores. Retailers have recently become highly important in spreading the news about a game's true release date, as evidenced by the recent announcement on EB and Gamestop's websites that Halo 2's release had slipped to June.

The EBgames release date is more in tune with the original rough release date given for the next GTA game when it was first announced last year, but the Best Buy date (which was recently updated) may be evidence of some insight that the massive national retailer has. Rockstar has been keeping news on the latest GTA game close to its chest, and there's nary a mention of it on the official Grand Theft Auto site nor on Rockstar's main website. They'll likely keep all official information wrapped up until E3 2004.