GTA 6 Vice City Subs Lawsuit: What Take-Two Actually Filed

TL;DR

The GTA 6 Vice City Subs lawsuit is a trademark opposition Take-Two filed against a sandwich shop, not a case it has won.

Filed Feb 13, 2026 at the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board: Take-Two v. DT Global Investment Holdings, Opposition No. 91305220.

The filing quietly disclosed that GTA: Vice City Stories has now sold over 7 million copies, up from the ~4.5 million last reported in 2008.

It fits a long pattern: Take-Two has challenged marks from “Bully” to a single letter “R.”

Watch the TTAB docket for the next move. There is no ruling yet.

A sandwich shop wanted to call itself Vice City Subs. Take-Two Interactive, which owns the Vice City name through Grand Theft Auto, told the U.S. trademark office no. That objection is what people are calling the GTA 6 Vice City Subs lawsuit, and it reveals more about how Take-Two guards its world than any trailer has.

What the GTA 6 Vice City Subs lawsuit actually is

Start with the part most headlines get wrong: this is not a courtroom lawsuit, and Take-Two has not won it. It is a Notice of Opposition filed at the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), the administrative body that decides whether a trademark should register. The case caption is Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. v. DT Global Investment Holdings LLC, Opposition No. 91305220, docketed February 13, 2026.

DT Global had applied to register “Vice City Subs” for a sandwich and restaurant business. Take-Two’s opposition argues that “Vice City” is a famous mark tied to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and that a food brand using the same words risks consumer confusion and dilution of that mark.

Here is the precision that matters. Filing an opposition opens a proceeding; it does not end one. Outlets that reported Take-Two “blocked” or “won” the trademark got ahead of the record. As of now the opposition filing is the latest docket action, and no ruling has been reported. DT Global can still answer, negotiate, or walk away. Nobody has decided anything yet.

In practice, most oppositions of this kind never reach a full TTAB decision. The applicant usually abandons the mark once a large rights-holder shows up, or the two sides settle on narrowed terms. That is worth remembering before treating the filing as a verdict: the paperwork is the leverage, and the leverage is often the whole point.

The 7-million-copy detail buried in the filing

The genuinely newsworthy part of this dispute has nothing to do with sandwiches. To establish that “Vice City” is famous enough to protect, Take-Two’s filing cited hard sales numbers. One of them updated a figure that had sat frozen for nearly two decades.

The brief disclosed that GTA: Vice City Stories, the 2006 PSP title, has now sold over 7 million copies worldwide. The last public number for that game was roughly 4.5 million, reported back in March 2008. A trademark filing, of all things, became the first sales update on Vice City Stories in about eighteen years.

Treat that for exactly what it is: a legal disclosure made to win an argument, not a marketing announcement from Rockstar. It is still a real, sourced figure, and it is the reason most gaming outlets covered the story at all.

Why a sandwich shop matters for GTA 6

The timing is the point. Vice City is one of six regions in the state of Leonida, the setting of GTA 6, which launches November 19, 2026. The Vice City name is about to be worth more than it has been since 2002, and Take-Two is tidying up loose claims on it before the game arrives. Guarding the name now is the trademark equivalent of locking down the gta 6 vice city map before anyone else can plant a flag on it.

That protective instinct runs wider than one opposition. Reports say Rockstar and Take-Two registered a batch of GTA 6 world-building domains around May 2025, including one believed to be an in-game government site for Leonida plus a run of parody app addresses standing in for real services. Leak trackers pointed to names like what-up.app, rydeme.app, and buckme.app in the same batch, consistent with the satirical in-game internet GTA is known for. Those registrations were never officially confirmed and were later pulled, but the pattern lines up with the take-two leonidagov domain reporting: the company appears to be reserving the fictional state’s assets ahead of launch. Treat the domain details as leak-tier, since Rockstar never acknowledged them.

Take-Two’s trademark record

None of this is a new mood brought on by GTA 6. Take-Two is one of the more aggressive trademark enforcers in the industry, with hundreds of USPTO disputes on record over words and phrases including “Rockstar,” “2K,” “Bully,” and “Social Club.”

The receipts are easy to find. Take-Two opposed Hazelight Studios’ attempt to register “It Takes Two,” and Hazelight abandoned the application (Take-Two later dropped its own related appeal). It has contested a single-letter “R” mark against Remedy Entertainment. And in December 2025, its brand-protection agents issued a DMCA takedown against a browser-based fan revival of an old GTA game hosted on an emulator site. Opposing a sandwich shop is not an outlier for this company. It is the house style.

For a fan-site ecosystem, that distinction is the whole lesson. Take-Two goes after the mark, not the commentary. Discussing, analyzing, and reporting on Grand Theft Auto is fine. Putting “Vice City” on a storefront, a product, or a brand name is what draws the filing.

What to watch

The next signal lives on the TTAB docket for Opposition No. 91305220, not in a press release. DT Global’s response, or a quiet settlement, will tell us whether Take-Two pushes this to a ruling or simply gets the application withdrawn, which is how most of these end. Either way, expect more of the same as launch nears: every “Vice City” and “Leonida” application filed between now and November is a candidate for the same treatment. The name is the landmine. The coverage is not.