A new Bolivian cat species arrived. GTA 6 still has not.

Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in development since 2015. In that time, scientists identified an entirely new cat.

The journal Current Biology published the discovery of Leopardus tilcayo this week, better known as the tilcayo tiger cat. It is smaller than a typical housecat, with spots and round ears, and it turned up in Bolivia's Yungas forest. According to the report, it is the first new cat species named in more than 100 years.

The cat is real. The punchline writes itself.

How many remain in the wild is still unknown, co-author Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz told NBC News. She did not set out to rewrite the feline family tree. She volunteers at a wildlife rehab facility near La Paz, noticed a tiny cat that did not match what she expected, and the rest became a paper. National Geographic circulated the find as well.

GameSpot ran the juxtaposition because the timing is a joke the internet was going to make anyway. Rockstar has been building Vice City for the better part of a decade. Biology logged a new spotted cat in the meantime. I will not pretend this is a systems preview. It is a clock. One project shipped a species name. The other still has not shipped a street.

GTA 6's first trailer landed in December 2023 and turned Lucia into a desktop image. Subsequent footage has been picked apart for cars and cops. Release dates have been the sport. None of those dates are in the notes we had, so I will not invent one. The hard number we do have is 2015. That is eleven years of development by the time this cat got a Latin name. Plenty of games have taken long. Few of them have a mammal named while they were still in the trailer loop.

Nogales-Ascarrunz's accident is the part I like more than the Rockstar gag. Rehab work near La Paz. A cat that did not match the chart. A journal that will outlast a meme. Population unknown. If you care about the animal, that unknown is the actual story. If you care about Vice City, you already knew the wait was grotesque. Now you have a spotted mascot for it.

Eleven years is long enough for a species

Open-world production got slower after GTA V in 2013, not faster. Rockstar's last generation of maps taught every other studio to spend longer in preproduction and still miss. Players filled the gap with memes. GTA 6 will ship after X became a format. A new cat is funnier than most of those, because X is usually a gadget, not a forest animal with round ears.

I do not think a species name should be reduced to a loading-screen joke. I also do not think Rockstar gets to escape the comparison. When your trailer cycle outlasts a taxonomic paper, the comparison is fair. Take the L. Then look up the Yungas. Then remember the paper is in Current Biology, not on a leak account.

Other long projects on this beat at least talk about the handoff. Witcher 3's producer is nervous about giving an expansion to another studio. Warcraft III is getting a campaign meant to bridge into WoW. Those teams are shipping chapters, or admitting they are scared to. Rockstar is still holding the map. Catalog policy fights like Xbox One's DRM mess at least produced a workaround you can use. GTA 6 has produced trailers.

Practical bit, if you actually want the science: read the Current Biology paper, not a screenshot of a spotted kitten. The animal is smaller than a typical housecat. Spots. Round ears. Bolivian Yungas. First new cat species in over 100 years, according to the discovery as reported. Population in the wild: unknown. That is the whole useful card. Everything else is a Vice City punchline.

Do not refresh a leak account. Refresh the journal.

Rockstar will announce a date when it announces a date. The tilcayo tiger cat does not care. It is already named. If you need a Vice City update, wait for an official post, not for the next mammal. If you need something that already exists, the paper is out this week.

I will take Nogales-Ascarrunz's accident over another year of tire-kicking a trailer. The cat is smaller than a housecat and already more finished than the game. That sentence should embarrass a studio that has had since 2015. It should also send a few people to look up the Yungas who would never open Current Biology. Both outcomes are fine. Only one of them required Rockstar, and Rockstar still has not shown up.