How Rockstar Actually Builds a GTA: Road Trips With Cops, Eight-Week Milestones and a Writers' Room for Pedestrians

Rockstar builds Grand Theft Auto VI in eight-week milestones, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson told LOVE magazine in Issue 27, which went on sale Monday, October 5. Before any of that, a small group drove from Miami through the Florida Keys to Key West, and later came back with cops, gang members and a helicopter.

Most games start with a pitch deck. This one started with a rental car.

Rockstar Researched Florida With Cops, Gang Members and a Helicopter

Garbut told LOVE that the first trip was small: “To begin, a small group of us spent some time traveling from Miami through some of the surrounding towns and through the Florida Keys down to Key West.” Per GTAVice’s read of the full interview, he calls those drives one of his favorite parts of the job. Friends in a car for days, talking about what they wanted to make (Reported).

That first pass isn’t the real research. It’s for finding out which places stick. Then Rockstar comes back “in greater numbers.” Garbut says he recorded everything with cameras and phones, and the team went looking for Florida’s underside on purpose: “We travel around with cops and with gang members. Everyone is lovely. Some people are equally scary.”

The best story is the helicopter. Garbut and several art directors spent a full day filming from the air, low and fast over the Everglades’ mangrove inlets, then over downtown Miami and the beaches. At one point they hovered over a stadium during a Beyoncé concert. “I think we made the local news the next day,” he said. A fan has tried to match the flight to a 2016 aerial permit. That match is Unverified, and Rockstar hasn’t dated the trip.

Rockstar has done this before. For GTA IV, its New York team shot six figures’ worth of reference photos. Leslie Benzies claimed more than 100,000, and Garbut guessed around 250,000 (our GTA IV retrospective). Leonida got the same treatment, plus a pilot.

The Story Gets Pinned to the Map Before It Gets Written

Nelson’s order of operations is the part worth framing. Once Rockstar picks a location, the team researches it until they understand it. Then they decide which areas to recreate, what kinds of people you should meet, and what kind of protagonist would let you see the widest range of that world. Only then: “A rough narrative is then created, with major story beats physically plotted against the map” (Reported, GTAVice).

Read that with Jason and Lucia in mind. If Nelson’s order holds, the leads were picked partly for where they can take you: a Keys drug-runner’s couch, a penitentiary corridor, a Vice City club. Kotaku adds that the senior team has been together for a “loooooooong time,” Nelson’s spelling, and that Rockstar has worked on GTA 6 “in some capacity since 2014.” That second line is Kotaku’s, not Nelson’s.

Nelson also says realism isn’t the goal by itself. Rockstar chases it only as far as it makes the world more immersive, and drops it when it gets tedious. So, more puddles, fewer tax forms.

GTA 6 Is Built in Eight-Week Milestones

Here’s the whole quote, via Kotaku: “We build the game up through a series of eight-week milestones where we pull agreed-upon sections of the game together. We evaluate those milestones and make loads of notes that will determine what we focus on for the next milestone. We work our way there, year after year, one obsessive day at a time, course-correcting as we go; always with the feeling we want the finished game to have firmly in mind, knowing that often we have to find that feeling, and trusting that, even if we haven’t found it yet, we will eventually!”

In plain terms, every two months the studio stitches its parts into something it can play, looks at it, writes the notes, and points the next eight weeks at the problems. Before that, Nelson says, “we begin roughing in content across all areas of development.” Everything grows at once, and nothing ships until it works together. It also explains the long silences. The game existed the whole time. It just kept getting rebuilt.

That calendar comes with history. In 2018 Dan Houser said the team had been “working 100-hour weeks” on Red Dead Redemption 2, then clarified he meant a small senior writing group and added, “we don’t ask or expect anyone to work anything like this.” Staff accounts published afterward pushed back (Reported, Kotaku, Forbes). Kotaku reported in 2020 that Rockstar said it had taken “conscious steps” to reduce overtime, and Bloomberg reported further workplace changes in 2022 (Reported). Nelson’s description of the loop doesn’t mention hours at all.

A Writers’ Room Just for Pedestrians

This is the detail that made people sit up. Horton told LOVE that Rockstar “dreamed a lot bigger this time around”: it set up a new writing team in Los Angeles whose only job is pedestrian dialogue, next to a production team with the same brief. Narrative chief Rupert Humphries adds advertising and comedy writers across New York, Los Angeles and London. “And none of us see it as background!” he said (Reported).

Horton’s test is a good one. Sprint down the busiest street and you should hear “snatches of a hundred different conversations.” Stop and listen to any one of them, and it should hold up. His lines on this are the most quoted of the week: “In a way, there is no ‘background’ in this game; there’s just foreground that you’re not paying attention to right now.” And: “No one you meet is an extra; they’re not only full characters, everyone you meet is the main character in their own story.”

One caution. Some recaps turned this into “hundreds of writers.” GTAVice paraphrases Horton as needing hundreds of different approaches and voices. That isn’t a headcount, and we won’t print it as one. Horton’s own summary is shorter: “You need an ensemble team to make an ensemble world.”

What the Loops Produced, According to Game Informer

Game Informer’s Issue 382 cover story, live for digital subscribers September 29, is where the milestones turn into features (Reported). More than 170 animal species, from flamingos and pelicans to manatees and alligators. Kotaku has said “over 150,” and we go with Game Informer’s 170+. Weather that VP Owen Shepherd says was re-engineered to be “much more localized and persistent,” so a storm can soak one block and miss the next (weather). And a map Garbut calls Rockstar’s biggest “by some degree,” about twice GTA V (Leonida, region by region).

Then there’s the people pipeline. Dazed reported in August that Rockstar hired Miami stylist Jillian Carr full time in 2023 to build a “fashion ecosystem,” brought in racing drivers for vehicle handling, and had 50 real street artists design murals (Reported, via IGN). In LOVE, art VP Michael Kane talks about the “crazy nuance” in clothing, makeup and hairstyles from region to region. Somebody decided what a Port Gellhorn haircut looks like, and it took meetings.

How Big Is the Team? Rockstar Hasn’t Said

Dazed reported that Rockstar “doubled in size” after Red Dead Redemption 2, with a new Los Angeles office working “almost solely” on the game’s NPCs. IGN noted Rockstar had roughly 2,000 employees in 2018 and did the math: about 4,000 now (Estimate, IGN’s arithmetic). Rockstar has added studios in India and Australia along the way.

You’ll also see fan-site tallies near 6,000, split studio by studio. Rockstar hasn’t confirmed them, so we’re not printing the breakdown. What’s certain: it took a lot of people.

What We Still Don’t Know

• How many eight-week milestones GTA 6 went through, or when the current version of Leonida first came together.
• Rockstar’s actual headcount and budget.
• When the research trips happened. The helicopter day is undated.
• How much pedestrian dialogue there is. “No one you meet is an extra” is a promise we can only test on launch day.

The Official Clock

Pre-load opens November 12. GTA 6 unlocks November 19 at 12:00 a.m. ET, per US store listings. That’s when Nelson’s loop stops and the notes become a place. Go find a pedestrian and see if they hold up. Countdown: the last six weeks.

LOVE Issue 27, explained · Who at Rockstar said what · The LOVE cover · 170+ species · The Dazed interview · Leonida map

Sources: Kotaku · GTAVice (LOVE) · GameSpot · IGN (Dazed) · GTAVice (Game Informer) · Kotaku (2020)

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