Ten Years, 5,000 Staff, a Billion Dollars: Inside Grand Theft Auto VI

Grand Theft Auto VI has taken nearly ten years, a team of close to 5,000 people and a reported billion dollars to build — and Rockstar Games has finally let critics touch it. The Guardian, granted exclusive access inside the studio, published its hands-on account on 15 November 2026 and delivered a blunt verdict: the game "more than lives up to the hype."

The scale of the production is the story's hardest fact. A franchise that began as a modest title has become a global operation employing almost 5,000 developers around the world. The budget figure attached to the project — a billion dollars — places it among the most expensive entertainment productions of any kind, film included.

Yet the machine's centre remains small and specific. The series, brazenly American in setting and voice, is mainly made in Scotland.

Where is Grand Theft Auto actually made?

Rockstar North sits in Holyrood, in Edinburgh, in the shadow of Arthur's Seat. For anyone who grew up in the city, the studio functions as local mythology. In the 2000s, a stream of Edinburgh residents passed through its doors as game testers or employees. The Guardian's writer, a student in the city at the time, recalls rumours of wild parties at executives' houses — "as decadent as those in the game." At bars, birthdays and housewarmings, you might meet someone claiming credit for one of the franchise's puerile puns: the Japanese restaurant Nutsaki, or the fried-chicken chain Cluckin' Bell.

The contrast is stark. A game built in a Scottish capital, by a team whose humour was forged in Edinburgh student parties, now defines American pop culture.

Grand Theft Auto has spent 20 years as one of the world's most popular and most controversial video games. It has also been among the most mocked and most litigated. Nothing in that record, the Guardian suggests, prepared observers for the sheer size of this instalment.

What does GTA VI change for players?

The setting moves as far from Edinburgh as geography allows. Grand Theft Auto VI takes place in Vice City, in the fictional state of Leonida — a parody of Miami, Florida. The Guardian describes it as "a neon-soaked metropolis of sleaze and struggle, hard-partying excess juxtaposed with a barely concealed criminal underworld and unpredictable Florida madness."

That description carries weight because it comes from direct play time, not a trailer. The visit to Rockstar Games produced what the paper calls a hands-on encounter with "the cultural event of the decade," and the confirmation that the game lives up to expectation.

For an industry that has watched budgets balloon and release schedules slip, the stakes are considerable:

• nearly ten years of development time;
• close to 5,000 staff worldwide;
• a production cost reported at a billion dollars;
• a release framed, without apparent irony, as the decade's cultural event.

The central nervous system of that operation still sits in Holyrood. A Scottish studio, an American fantasy, a Miami parody — and, on the evidence of the first hands-on verdict, a game that delivers.