Details of how Grand Theft Auto VI was made have been revealed in a major piece for Bloomberg by journalist Jason Schreier. He spoke with the leadership of Rockstar and found out why the work took more than eight years, how the pandemic affected it, and why the release was postponed twice.
Preparations for the game began as early as 2015. The original concept, under the working title Project Americas, was ambitious: the action was to unfold across territories in North and South America. The plans were later abandoned in favor of a fictional state of Leonida and the city of Vice City, modeled on Florida and Miami. To gather material, studio staff rode along with police through high-crime neighborhoods, photographed the city from helicopters, and studied the life of nightclubs.
Initially, work on GTA VI was supposed to proceed alongside the studio's other game, Red Dead Redemption 2. However, the Western turned out to be so vast that most of the staff had to be moved over to finish it. This pushed the active phase of GTA VI development back by several years. Production was also slowed by the onset of the pandemic, when employees switched to remote work and the motion-capture studio, where character animations are recorded, came to a complete halt.
Over the course of the work on the game, Rockstar's headcount nearly doubled: from 2,441 people in 2018 to 4,711 by August 2026. The company even opened a new studio in Los Angeles to handle the development of non-player characters, the virtual residents of the city whose behavior is governed by artificial intelligence. After the leak of work materials in 2022, the company tightened its security measures and abandoned remote work.
The studio does not disclose the game's exact budget. Jennifer Kolbe, head of the publishing division, in conversation with the journalist denied rumors of a sum of $1.5 billion, but Schreier believes that GTA VI may still turn out to be the most expensive project in the history of the industry. The game's release, which was planned for 2025 at the end of 2023, has already been postponed twice. It is now expected to come out in November 2026.
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