Hello Joshimuz.com readers! I come to you while on holiday in a little static caravan on the Isle of Wight with Faye (who’s helping with the maths/spreadsheets of today’s post). I’m sat at the kitchen table sipping orange juice and writing this on my MacBook which is not a situation I thought I’d ever find myself in.

Ahead of the release of GTA:VI in late May next year I’ve been planning to do an “All Rockstar Games” marathon, where I will do a playthrough of every Rockstar made game chronologically leading up to GTA:VI!

Now this raises a few questions, mainly: “What games are included?” and “how long will that take?”, both of which I hope to answer here today!

What Games?

First the main question, what games? You’d think that “just every Rockstar” game would be easy enough, however there’s a bunch of complications such as how Rockstar changed name, how they not only just make games but publish them, and even just the searching difficulty of “Rockstar games…. Games”. Fortunately for us, I knew about an easy answer to this question as Rockstar themselves keep a list of their own games. This seems like a better list to use than any 3rd party like myself or Wikipedia.

This list does have a few questionable choices, such as Smuggler’s Run PS2 and Smuggler’s Run Gamecube being multiple entries, and even just the order in which things are listed is… confusing. But we can deal with those issues and take a few liberties with what we include and what order we do them in.

What... order are these listed in?

How long will it take?

With the list question mostly solved, now we can tackle the next, bigger, question; "How long will it take?" It’s a bit of a hard question to answer for a few reasons, but one I kinda need to know in order to plan when to actually start the marathon.

Firstly, we need an estimate for how long each game takes to beat. While I’ve played a few of them, and speedrun a bunch of them, there’s a lot I’ve never even heard of which makes knowing how long they are a bit hard.

Thankfully, this is where howlongtobeat.com and Remo come in! After talking about this on stream one day, Remo went ahead and made a big list of all the games from Rockstar’s website on howlongtobeat.com, a website dedicated to figuring out how long it takes on average for people to complete games.

Here’s the list which if you scroll to the bottom says it’ll take 28 Days 18 Hours, otherwise known as 690 hours! (Nice) This doesn’t include GTA:O or RDR:O playthrough times, but those are both so massive I realistically could spend any amount of time I want to in those, from 0 hours to infinity, so we won’t worry about those and instead I’ll just play them as filler between the end of the marathon and GTA:VI release to making timing easier.

So 690 hours then, there’s our answer… right? Well not quite, sure that gives us an amount of hours, but for me to plan when to start we also need to know how many hours I stream on average. Thankfully I can look at my Twitch stats for how many hours I stream a month and take an average. Here’s the last year’s months excluding September because of JDQ:
August: 122 hours
July: 144
June: 126
May: 96 (I went to an event that month)
April: 65 (Went to an event and also held GTA Marathon!)
March: 97
Feb: 76 (again, event)
Jan: 75 (Event)

December: 127
November: 102
October: 127

We can see just how many stream hours I lose to going to events! But looking at this I’m inclined to just give a rough estimate of 100 hours a month. Sometimes it’s much more sometimes it’s much less, but 100 seems safe and easy to calculate with. So with that it would seem that it’ll take approximately 7 months to complete! That means in order to complete before GTA:VI releases at the end of May I’d need to start… Right fucking now! Uh oh!

No wait, it’s OK! We just took the howlongtobeat.com average time and naively used that for our calculations. There’s a few other things we need to consider! Firstly, I speedrun a lot of the games, and secondly I would hazard a guess that I finish games a lot faster than the average gamer.

Since I’ve done a few playthroughs of games recently, we can take my completion times of those and compare them to the website’s times. Here’s a list of all the ones I could find:
Bully - Me: 12 Hours. Website: 15.
The Getaway - Me: 10.5. Website 12.5.
Mafia The Old Country - Me: 12. Website 12.
Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories - Me: 10. Website 14.

So other than Mafia I’m always faster than the average, by roughly 25%, but lets say 20% to be safe since I did take the same for Mafia and these are all styles of games I’m familiar with, while not all Rockstar games’s games are 3rd person shooters.

As for the games I speedrun, we can get a really good estimate for how long those will take. My literal marathon estimates from Josh Done Quick! Below is a list of all the estimates:
RDR (XBOX) - 06:50:00
RDR:UNDEAD NIGHTMARE - 01:30:00
GTA:SA (NMG)- 05:30:00
GTA:SA DE (NMG) - 06:25:00
GTA:TBOGT - 02:10:00
GTA:VC (NMG) - 02:10:00
GTA:VC DE (NMG) - 02:45:00
GTA:VCS (NMG) - 05:05:00
GTA:IV - 08:00:00
GTA:TLAD - 02:30:00
GTA:III - 02:30:00
GTA:III DE (NMG) - 02:15:00

However we also have to consider that this is supposed to be a playthrough marathon, not a speedrun marathon, and while I can’t magically unlearn the runs and play for the first time again, I can at least do Cutscene% (No Major Glitches) speedruns. That again brings us to uncertainty however since I don’t know how long each game is cutscene%. I do however know how long VCS, SA and SA DE will be Cutscene% as I’ve done both of those! Taking the time difference between Cutscene% and No Major Glitches of those two runs, making that a percentage and then increasing the time of all the other runs by that amount should give us a super rough estimate of how long they’ll be on average too. Here’s those calculations (I’m rounding up so not 100% accurate):

GTA:SA Cutscene%: 9:00:00. NMG 5:30:00. Difference 3:30:00. Percentage increase: 64%.
GTA:SA DE Cutscene% 10:00:00. NMG 6:30:00. Difference 3:30:00. Percentage increase: 56%.
GTA:VCS Cutscene% 7:30:00. NMG 5:05:00. Difference 2:25:00. Percentage increase: 48%.

With this (and also with ignoring DE) that comes out to an average of roughly 55% increase in time. If I wanted to be super duper accurate I could look up Youtube videos of “Every cutscene in X game” and see how long they were for each, then add those times on directly, but I think 55% sounds pretty close to my guess (I would’ve said 50%) so I’m happy to use that number.

Smush both the reduced howlongtobeat.com estimates and the increased speedrun estimates together (with the previous Bully and Liberty City playthrough times) and we’ll have our total time!

So... how long will it take?

341 hours, which if we again assume I’ll “only” stream 100 hours a month will be 3 and a half months. (Calculating with an estimate of 5 days a week, 6 hours a day we get 2.84 months, but I’ll take the higher estimate based on Twitch data.)

With this in mind, I think a perfectly good time to set for when to start the marathon is the beginning of 2026! If I start the 1st of January, that gives me 4 and a half months, which is one month more than the estimate. That sounds like plenty of leeway time to allow for events and days off doing something else, and gives a nice clean start date! If I do indeed finish nearly a month early, I can fill the remaining time with the near unlimited RDR:O and GTA:O content as I mentioned earlier, meaning I don’t need to do any tricking timing stuff to finish RDR:2 at exactly May 26th.

And that’s it, that should hopefully be everything I need to start the marathon at the correct time and play the correct games. I’m looking forward to seeing what all the fussy is about games like Max Payne and Midnight Club, as well as play some random retro games!

A big thanks for Faye for helping with all the maths on the estimates, she’s made a big google sheet with all the calculations on, and a little checklist for when I’m doing the marathon to see if I’m still on track to complete the marathon in time. I spent the whole time writing this sat next to her while we figured everything out for a few hours.

And a big thanks to you for reading! I hope this was actually interesting to read. If you think we got any of the maths wrong, or you really think *insert game here* should be included, let me know in the comments!

See you all the beginning of January for Joshimuz’s Big Rockstar Games Marathon!