Rockstar Doubled to 4,711 Staff Across 12 Offices to Build GTA VI

The project began in 2015 under the codename Project Americas. The team's original plan was a world covering large stretches of North and South America, with players moving through cross-border smuggling networks. Management concluded that the map exceeded what the studio could build, and Rockstar narrowed the setting to Leonida, modelled on modern Miami, with Vice City as its core.

Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson led the first scouting group to Florida in 2015. Studio head Aaron Garbut recalled driving from downtown Miami to Key West and taking helicopters low over the Everglades and the city skyline; on one night the helicopter hovered above a stadium during a concert, and the team learned from the news the next day that Beyoncé had been performing. Over the past decade, research teams returned repeatedly to South Florida to hold long conversations with patrol officers, gang members, nightclub promoters, licensed firearms dealers and former prisoners, looking for what Garbut described as the desires, restlessness and absurdity the region produces. The weather system was built as a self-contained physical entity: clouds migrate with the wind, regions carry independent weather states, and standing water collects and evaporates according to terrain. To study tropical storms and hurricanes, developers flew helicopters low along the South Florida coast and the Everglades.

Work on GTA VI idled for years while Red Dead Redemption 2 consumed senior management attention and core engineering resources, with the western's horse physiology, snow compression and hundreds of separate behaviour trees absorbing the company. Development shifted fully to modern Florida after RDR2 launched in late 2018. Co-founder Dan Houser, who had long led narrative and direction, took leave at that point and left in early 2020; leadership passed to a trio of Nelson, Garbut and Phil Hooker. Multiple leaders brought slow decisions and occasional clashes over creative direction, with staff at times unsure whose instructions applied. The 2020 pandemic shut motion-capture studios including those in London, and remote work combined with rapid hiring multiplied cross-team friction. Some veteran designers left in frustration. Nelson later said what the team needed most during those years was a trust comparable to the one the game's protagonists, Jason and Lucia, must build.

By around 2022, modules developed separately across studios began to interlock, and the team could see the complete game for the first time. Nelson has said early internal projections of the workload for street pedestrians were horrifying. Rather than reusing background figures, Rockstar built pedestrians with distinct body frames, sub-tropical clothing, accessories, walks and immediate reactions to weather or violence. The company formed a dedicated team in Los Angeles to handle street NPCs, and narrative senior vice president Rupert Humphries said a writers' group there produces dialogue specifically for passers-by, supported by advertising copywriters and comedy writers drawn from New York and London. The same systems support Jason and Lucia, who can text each other to arrange meetings, hold hands in a park, train at a gym, and coordinate during robberies and police chases.

The pursuit of realism produced a lasting internal argument about how far it should go. Developers debated whether buying beer should require walking to the cooler, opening the door, taking a bottle and paying at the register, or whether a stamina-restoring sandwich should require shopping for bread and ham first. Leonida holds more than 170 animal species, from alligators and manatees to pink flamingos and green iguanas, rendered with iridescence and fur-shading systems. More than 50 real street artists painted murals in Vice City's Stockyard district, and the vehicle handling team recruited professional racing drivers to tune how cars drift on asphalt and wet surfaces.

Hooker described one playtest in which he set out to check a scripted mission and instead crashed into another car. The other driver reversed into him and shouted through the window rather than driving off; a fight left Hooker low on health, and he entered a convenience store for supplies, was provoked by a passer-by, brawled again, found the clerk gone and pried open the register. Police arrived, he fled on foot, stole a parked luxury car for the drive to a fence, was nearly run off the road by a modified car playing loud bass, followed it into a hidden criminal hideout, collected new supplies and eventually reached the fence, where he received his next black-market lead. When he looked up from the screen, two hours had passed and the mission he meant to test had not begun.

Organising that scale has drawn scrutiny of working conditions. A 2018 Kotaku investigation into Rockstar before RDR2's release reported weeks routinely reaching 80 hours and QA teams on overnight standby. Publishing head Jennifer Kolbe said the company rebuilt its scheduling, expanded headcount, adjusted management tiers and offered compensatory time off and allowances for extra hours, stating that it would not rely on exhausting staff to finish. In September 2022, early development footage and core code from GTA VI leaked online; Garbut compared the experience to having strangers go through his dirty laundry.