Bud Burruss is burning five vacation days in November, and not one of them is for Thanksgiving.
The 36-year-old software engineer told The Wall Street Journal he’s taking the week before the holiday off to play Grand Theft Auto VI. He’s not planning to wreck himself over it, he says, but he’s not planning to pace himself either.
“I’m not going to be playing it for, like, 20 hours straight like an absentee father. But right out of the gate we’re going hard,” he said.
Burruss intends to go to bed early Wednesday night, wake up around 1 or 2 a.m. Thursday and start playing. His camera is already set up to capture footage for his YouTube channel.
The vacation math is getting out of hand
He’s not the outlier here. He’s the median.
Anna Ray, a 30-year-old medical-sales representative and pro wrestler, is taking off Thursday through Thursday and said she’ll prep meals in advance so she doesn’t lose hours to cooking.
Guilherme Stephano, a 34-year-old civil servant in Brazil, plans to cash in 10 days of vacation time. That’s a step down from the 20 days he took to grind Red Dead Redemption 2 when it landed in 2018, which tells you something about both the man and the studio.
Stack enough of those requests on the same HR calendar and the week before Thanksgiving starts to look less like a workweek and more like a rolling outage.
What’s actually on the schedule
Rockstar has Grand Theft Auto 6 scheduled for November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, the third Thursday of the month. Fans have circled it for months. They’ve also been waiting over a decade for a new entry in the series, which is roughly how long it takes a hobby to curdle into an appointment.
Whether it becomes the biggest entertainment release in history is still a prediction, not a fact. But the setup is there.
Less a game, more a place
Rockstar released an extended official preview last week, and fans haven’t stopped picking through the footage since.
The description that keeps surfacing from people who’ve watched it: this reads less like a game and more like a place. A life simulator where you can bounce between high-stress missions and errands that don’t matter at all.
It isn’t universally loved. Plenty of people came away from the preview unimpressed, and that’s a real reaction worth keeping in view.
It also probably won’t matter to the numbers. Enough people are interested to put entertainment and media records in play, and a decent slice of them will be watching the clock hit 1 a.m. on a Thursday with the office lights off and a capture card running.
