Rockstar Games says the wait after Grand Theft Auto VI should be shorter than the wait for it. In a new Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the making of GTA 6, studio leads Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut said the technology and team built for the game will carry straight into whatever Rockstar makes next.
“The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” Hooker said, as quoted by VGC. “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”
Garbut put it more bluntly. “We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project. But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.” Bloomberg compares the situation to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which arrived a year after GTA III because the groundwork was already in place, though nobody at Rockstar is suggesting a turnaround anywhere near that fast.
GTA 6 started as Project Americas
The feature also explains part of why GTA 6 took so long. Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson said a group of staff flew to Miami in 2015 on the first research trip for the game, which was then code-named Project Americas and was meant to feature parts of both North and South America, according to GamesRadar+.
The plan was for Rockstar North to build it alongside Rockstar San Diego’s work on Red Dead Redemption 2. As Red Dead grew, Nelson said, it needed the whole company, so GTA 6 was pushed back for years while the studio finished its western. These days, he said, most of the staff across Rockstar’s 11 studios work on one project at a time.
Garbut framed GTA 6 as the sum of everything that came before it. “The last 30 years has been practice for where we got to here,” he said, describing a team with “a sort of shared understanding, shared knowledge and a sort of shortcut to questions.”
Grand Theft Auto VI launches November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, more than eight years after Red Dead Redemption 2 arrived in October 2018. For more on the game’s setting, see RCG’s look at GTA 6’s Game Informer cover story on Leonida.
