Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier spent a day at Rockstar North's Edinburgh office and published a major feature on how Grand Theft Auto VI was made. It is the first time Rockstar has openly talked about the game's development struggles. Schreier interviewed head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe, the three heads of development Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker, and senior vice president for technology Jonathon Ashcroft.
The feature came with photos of the office and two new images from the game. On his YouTube channel, Schreier walked through the main points and added details that didn't make it into the piece.
Key takeaways
- Development took more than eight years. The first research trip to Miami was in 2015, but most of the studio was then moved onto Red Dead Redemption 2. Work on GTA 6 began in earnest in 2019, and by the end of that year the skeleton of the story was in place.
- The game's code name is Project Americas. It was meant to cover big swaths of North and South America, but the world was later cut down to Vice City and its surroundings.
- Rockstar nearly doubled in size: from 2,441 employees in 2018 to 4,711 in August 2026, across 12 offices.
- Rockstar built a new studio in Los Angeles just for NPCs, staffed with writers, directors and producers who work only on non-playable characters.
- Rockstar won't disclose the budget. Kolbe only shot down the rumor that the game cost more than the Burj Khalifa ($1.5 billion). Schreier believes it is the most expensive video game ever made.
- The protagonists run on a dedicated AI system that took years to get right. Playing as Jason, you can text Lucia and meet up: they walk through a park holding hands, hit the gym together, rob a store and run from the cops, bantering the whole time.
- The team spent a long time debating realism: should you have to take the beer out of the fridge and carry it to the counter yourself, or buy groceries before you can make a sandwich?
- Nightclubs are filled with individually animated patrons, and the lighting moves in sync with the music. In his video, Schreier added that the game has a sweat system: the harder a character dances, the more they sweat.
- Hooker recalled a build review where he spent two hours without getting anywhere near the story mission. A fender bender, a fight, a robbed register, a police chase, an expensive stolen car, tailing another car, a compound full of goods to steal and a fence: none of it was scripted.
- The first trailer promised 2025. The release then slipped to May 2026, and later to November 19. When told about the second delay, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said: "You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding."
- The online component is expected in 2027.
- Rockstar's next game won't take another eight years. The leads compare it to the jump from GTA III to Vice City, which took less than a year because it was built on existing work.
We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project. But now it's done, and we're not going to rip it apart.
Rockstar North Office
Rockstar North occupies a three-story building that formerly housed the offices of The Scotsman newspaper. Screens with GTA 6 character artwork hang in the atrium. Schreier arrived in late September when the team was fixing bugs: the monitors displayed a mosaic of green and red tiles, and there were more green ones.
Fans camp outside the building and even count late-night pizza orders to guess important development milestones, but security chases them away.
Photos: Robert Ormerod / Bloomberg Businessweek.
New Images
Rockstar created exclusive artwork for the magazine: a sports car on a night street in Leonida and a police helicopter with a searchlight over it.
The second new image shows Jason and Lucia, covered in mud, next to a pickup in an off-road zone. It opens the gallery below.
Artwork and images: Rockstar Games.
How the studio changed
Red Dead Redemption 2 meant months of 60-hour workweeks for many staff, and leadership decided not to repeat it.
We're not going to finish this game by crunching.
The studio hired more people, recalibrated how long tasks should take and introduced paid time off for extra hours worked, in some cases with additional pay. Kolbe admits it has "not been perfect, but it's certainly better than Red Dead II was." According to Schreier, rank-and-file developers bring up crunch far less often than they used to.
In September 2022, a hacker phished their way into Rockstar's Slack and leaked dozens of videos of unfinished gameplay. "It feels like somebody's wading through your dirty washing," Garbut says. Since 2024, every employee has had to be in the office five days a week, and GTA 6 developers can't access Rockstar's servers and tools from home. A childcare emergency means taking a vacation day. It remains the company's most polarizing policy. Kolbe says Rockstar will reexamine it after launch, though she doubts it will switch to a hybrid schedule. Another major leak happened in August anyway.
After co-founder Dan Houser left, three veterans shared the title of head of development. Some staff complained about indecision and conflicting directions. Nelson counters that a single leader can have the same problems.
Last year Rockstar fired 34 people, most of whom were trying to form a union. The company says they shared confidential information on a Discord server with hundreds of members. The fired workers dispute this. The case is before a tribunal in Glasgow, with a resolution expected at the end of October. Meanwhile, the union group has been meeting management every week.
We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union.
GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. On October 15, Rockstar released the launch trailer, and Schreier has promised more videos about the game's development.
Magazines covered the game's world in the same weeks: Game Informer gave Leonida 14 pages and 12 screenshots, and Rockstar's writers told LOVE magazine about Jason and Lucia.