Grand Theft Auto VI Arrives Next Week After a Decade of Obsessive Research

By Marcus Bennett

Grand Theft Auto VI arrives next week, more than ten years after a group of Rockstar North developers first flew to Miami to begin field research for the biggest game in the world.

That first trip came in 2015. "Before you're doing hyper-organised research trips, you're immersing yourself in the place and its history, the vibe of it," Rob Nelson, one of the lead developers on GTA VI, said. "[You see] the physical places you want to move characters through, the experiences you want them to have, and the juxtaposition between the extremes of society that are in Miami."

The setting always comes first at Rockstar. Developers absorb the real place before deciding what players will do there; from that immersion emerge the story and its characters. This time, the story follows a criminal couple on the run named Jason and Lucia.

Were the researchers ever recognised? "We're always semi-undercover," Nelson said. "But if you have a bunch of dorks going through a terrifying neighbourhood, you do stick out a bit."

How do you build a virtual Florida?

A few weeks before release, Rockstar North's Edinburgh headquarters hosted a demonstration of the finished game. Nelson and fellow senior executive Jennifer Kolbe walked the press through Vice City, the fictional Miami at the heart of Leonida, the game's virtual Florida.

The detail runs from macro to micro. Architecture and geography sit alongside the clothes pedestrians wear, street art, flyers on cafe walls and the insides of fridges. Nelson, whose purview covers design, narrative and animation, plus some casting, delighted in showing how Jason eats a hot dog, or takes bites of a donut with one hand while sipping a beer with the other at a gas station. When Jason runs, he hikes his six-pack of beers into the crook of his arm, the liquid sloshing in the bottles. During one jewellery-store stick-up, Nelson grew briefly upset over the placement of a security guard's feet.

"The game is so vast that no one person could hold enough of it in their heads," Nelson said. Almost 5,000 people made GTA VI, under a small group of long-tenured decision-makers; lead writer Rupert Humphries has been at the company since 2008. The patience of parent company Take-Two Interactive, plus an abundance of money and time, puts this level of detail out of reach for any other developer.

The worlds feel grounded because they are built on real experiences. For Grand Theft Auto IV, set in the New York-inspired Liberty City, "people who had lived in New York all their lives were going to places they would never go to," Kolbe said. "We then give that experience to players." The Florida research included a Miami nightclub until 4am, a racetrack drive hours later with a momentous hangover, a police ridealong in South Beach and strange bars in the Florida Keys. "Some of our team, especially the artists, are very intrepid," Nelson said. "They'll go wandering in all sorts of places with their cameras. They're fearless."

Could GTA ever leave America?

Rockstar has built fascinatatingly detailed Americas before: GTA V (2013) as a microcosm of California, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) as the old west. Could a GTA be set elsewhere? "Never say never, but there's still so much to do in America," Nelson said.

Does the studio's outsider status, based mostly outside the US with offices in New York and San Diego, shape its view? "I think we're all outsiders to this version of America," Nelson said. "It doesn't matter where you live ... no one experiences the America that we're portraying here in its fullness."

What else this week?

• Tanuki: Pon's Summer (Xbox Game Pass, Switch, PC, roughly six hours) is one of the few games launching near GTA VI. Christian Donlan: "Arriving alongside November's blue wave, Tanuki: Pon's Summer is a game of quiet restoration that feels perfectly suited to the current moment."
• Indie co-op darling Big Walk is mired in AI controversy after developer House House disclosed to Independent Games Festival jurors that an LLM helped solve a coding problem during development.
• Nintendo is hiring a historian/librarian to preserve the documentation of its games and hardware.
• Canada's Super Channel is making a documentary on BioWare, the RPG studio EA closed last month after 30 years.

On spoilers, a reader asked how to avoid them before finishing the game. The honest answer: stay off the internet, because a thousand content creators will post everything within days. But outside the story, players create their own experience with Jason and Lucia — and nobody can spoil that.