GTA 6 may drop the sprint button mash, an invited creator says

Running in Grand Theft Auto VI would no longer mean mashing X on PlayStation 5 or A on Xbox Series X|S. MikeShowSha, an Italian creator hosted by Rockstar Games in Edinburgh in July 2026, says a single click on the left stick is now enough to make the character run. Numerama reported his account on September 1, 2026.

MikeShowSha spent roughly two hours in front of the game, seated next to Rob Nelson, co-director of Rockstar North, and made three videos about the visit. In one of them, a subscriber asks whether walking feels less stiff than in earlier GTA games and in Red Dead Redemption 2. His answer opens with a detail. Numerama published it in French, as « Ils ont enfin changé les touches », which reads in English:

“They have finally changed the buttons.”

He adds that moving on foot felt smoother and less heavy than in Red Dead Redemption 2. Nobody had described that change before him.

Rockstar has published no control scheme for GTA 6, not with the Extended Look on August 27, 2026, and not since. And none of the July guests ever held a controller: MP1st reported the hands-off format on August 19, 2026, and Pure Xbox said the same on August 27 while rounding up the first previews. What MikeShowSha describes, he watched a Rockstar developer play, with that developer’s own settings.

GTA V already sprints on a stick click

Since GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar has shipped several preset control layouts, some borrowed from shooters. They already let a player sprint with a stick click instead of hammering X. The setting sits deep in the menus, and plenty of players do not know it is there. A new default and an old preset look identical on screen.

The button mashing goes back to Grand Theft Auto III, released on October 23, 2001 on PlayStation 2: 25 years of tapping to run. Rockstar walked IGN through car theft and the criminal profile on August 27, 2026, and never through the buttons.

In the same run of videos, MikeShowSha relays another point Rob Nelson made to him: GTA 6 runs at 30 frames per second on a standard PS5. That figure lines up with the one Brazilian creator Davy Jones gave, relayed by Kotaku on August 27, 2026. Two creators give the same number, in two languages, and Rockstar has still published nothing with 76 days left to November 19, 2026.