Inside Rockstar North: How GTA 6 Got Made, Two Delays and All

GTA 6 took about eight years, two delays and a near-doubling of Rockstar’s staff, from 2,441 people in 2018 to 4,711 this August, according to Rockstar’s own figures in a new Bloomberg Businessweek cover story. Rockstar’s leaders told the magazine the game was not finished on crunch.

It is the first time the company has talked this openly about how it built the game. Every detail below comes secondhand, from outlets that read the paywalled feature.

The Crunch Story That Started It

In October 2018, Schreier, then at Kotaku, interviewed current and former Rockstar staff about Red Dead Redemption 2. Many described average weeks of 55 to 60 hours during the long final push (Reported). Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing, told him then: “I think we’ve realized that it’s not sustainable.”

In July 2022, Bloomberg reported a different Rockstar. It opened with a GTA Online mode called Cops ’n’ Crooks, which senior executives shelved in the summer of 2020, during the reckoning over police violence (Reported). Schreier described a company changing its schedules and its tone, with GTA 6 likely to feel different from GTA V.

Project Americas Shrinks to Vice City

According to write-ups of the new feature, the first research trip to Miami was in 2015, and the project’s code name was “Project Americas” because it was meant to span parts of North and South America (Reported). It was cut down to Miami and its surroundings, which became Vice City and Leonida. GTA 6 was supposed to be built alongside RDR2, but that game kept growing and pulled most of the company onto it. By the end of 2019 the story skeleton was in place, with Jason and Lucia as a criminal couple robbing their way through a fictional Miami (Reported, DualShockers).

Rockstar’s own developers have described the research. Aaron Garbut, one of the three heads of development, told LOVE the team went on research trips with “cops and with gang members” (Reported). Rockstar’s Rupert Humphries told Game Informer the trips included “riding around areas at night with ex-cops.”

The “Dark Period”

After RDR2, several veterans left, including co-founder Dan Houser. IGN calls Hooker and Garbut co-heads of the studio (Reported).

The leads argued over how far realism should go: does buying a beer mean opening the fridge and paying at the counter? Then the pandemic shut down Rockstar’s performance-capture studios, and some senior designers quit. Nelson calls that stretch “a dark period.”

One argument settled the core design: “This is a game about a couple. They have to be a couple.” That’s why Jason and Lucia can text each other, meet up, hit the gym or rob a store together in the open world.

Two Phone Calls to Zelnick

Rockstar’s leaders say they believed the 2025 date. Kolbe made the call to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick for the first delay, to May 2026, and again for the second. “I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,’” she recalls. (Reported.)

The NPC workload was a big reason. Nelson called the projections “horrifying,” and Rockstar set up a Los Angeles studio dedicated to writing, directing and producing NPCs. Hooker: “We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.” Officially, Take-Two said on November 6, 2025 that Rockstar “will now release Grand Theft Auto VI on November 19, 2026” (Official). Our delay history has every date.

Crunch, Offices and Hours

Kolbe says GTA 6 was not finished on crunch. Rockstar hired more people, reset how long tasks were expected to take, and paid back extra hours with time off and sometimes extra pay. “It’s not been perfect,” she said, but “it’s certainly better than Red Dead 2 was” (Reported). Whether staff agree is Not confirmed: Kolbe herself says that whenever she says they didn’t crunch, someone will say they did.

The bigger sore spot is the office. Since 2024, staff have worked on site five days a week, and GTA 6 developers can’t reach Rockstar’s servers from home, for security reasons. Kolbe says the policy will be reviewed after launch but doubts it will go hybrid.

The Firings and the Union

On October 30, 2025, Rockstar dismissed 34 employees, 31 in the UK and three in Canada. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain called it “the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry” (Reported, GamesIndustry.biz). Rockstar said it acted against people “distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum” and that it “was in no way related to people’s right to join a union” (Official, Rockstar statement).

More than 200 Rockstar North staff signed a letter demanding their colleagues’ reinstatement. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it “a deeply concerning case.” In January 2026, the Glasgow Employment Tribunal refused the union’s request for interim relief; the full hearing ran this fall. Bloomberg reports both sides now meet weekly, and Kolbe says: “If they want a union, they will have a union.”

What It Cost, and What’s Next

Rockstar won’t give a budget. Bloomberg estimates more than $1 billion; Rockstar only denies passing $1.5 billion, a denial IGN attributes to head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe (Estimate). Bloomberg expects online in 2027 (Estimate). And the leads promise the next game won’t take eight years. Hooker: “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly” (Reported, via GamesRadar+). Garbut: “Now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.” Our Bloomberg explainer tracks each claim.

Official Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2, the official Rockstar Games upload.