GTA VI began as Project Americas, a map spanning two continents. Bloomberg tells how it got made

Long before it was Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar's next game had a far bigger working title: Project Americas. The original pitch was an open world stretching across large parts of North and South America. What ships on November 19 is Miami and its surroundings, rebuilt as Vice City and the fictional state of Leonida.

That detail comes from Jason Schreier's Bloomberg feature published October 14, reported from Rockstar North in Edinburgh in late September while the team was fixing bugs. Publishing chief Jennifer Kolbe and the game's three heads of development, Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker, all spoke on the record. There are no story spoilers. What it offers is the clearest explanation yet of why a game once slated for 2025 lands on November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, the date Rockstar's launch trailer still carries, more than eight years after Red Dead Redemption 2.

Two continents became one state

According to GTA Intel's breakdown, Rockstar's first research trip to Miami took place in 2015. The plan was to build the game alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but the western kept growing until it pulled in most of the company, pushing GTA VI back by years. Bloomberg doesn't say exactly when or why the continental map was dropped. It wasn't scaled down to something small, though: Garbut has described Leonida as roughly twice the size of GTA V's map, which you can check against the community's reconstruction of Leonida.

After Red Dead Redemption 2, longtime writer and figurehead Dan Houser left and leadership passed to Nelson, Garbut and Hooker. By the end of 2019 they had the basic story of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, with almost everything else still open. Then the pandemic shut the performance-capture stages where actors record movement and dialogue, a stretch Nelson calls a dark period. The full game only came into view in 2022. That September, an intruder got into Rockstar's Slack and leaked dozens of unfinished clips.

A whole studio for the people on the street

Headcount shows the scale best. Rockstar employed 2,441 people when Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018 and 4,711 across 12 offices as of August 2026. Some of that growth went to a single job: NPCs, the pedestrians, drivers, clerks and cops you don't control. Writing and animating them outgrew the company, so Rockstar set up a Los Angeles studio of writers, producers and directors devoted to nothing else. Nelson says the workload projections were frightening.

The lead couple needed similar effort. The team wanted Jason and Lucia to share the open world, walking through a park, hitting the gym or robbing a store together while they talk and joke. That took traditional game AI, the systems that decide how characters move and react, not a generative model like ChatGPT. The internal argument that won, as Vandal reports, was simple: a game about a couple has to behave like one. For where that idea could go next, see our look at Humalike's NPCs with memory.

The budget, the delays and the office

Rockstar won't give a figure. Kolbe dismisses reports that the budget topped $1.5 billion, while Schreier argues it is almost certainly the most expensive video game ever made, far beyond the roughly $500 million ceiling other publishers try to respect. The delays get an insider's view too: the game slipped from 2025 to May 2026 and then to November, and Kolbe recalls Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick begging to be told the second delay was a joke.

There is a workplace story as well. Since 2024, staff have worked in the office five days a week with no remote access to game servers, a security policy Kolbe says will be reviewed after launch, though she doubts hybrid work will return. In 2025 Rockstar fired 34 people, most of them tied to a union drive. The company says they shared confidential information, and an employment tribunal in Glasgow is expected to rule at the end of October. On crunch, the brutal hours before launch, leadership says planning and overtime pay have changed, without claiming it is gone.

No more eight-year waits, supposedly

The line everyone has picked up is the leads' promise that the next game won't take this long. Hooker says the engine, tools and teams built for GTA VI will let Rockstar move faster, and Garbut stresses that they aren't going to tear it all down now that the work is done. Their precedent is Vice City, made in under a year in 2002 on top of GTA III.

I only half buy it. Reused tech saves time when the next game looks like the last one, and nothing suggests Rockstar's next project is another GTA. With 4,711 employees, a studio just for NPCs and a technical bar this high, ambition can outrun the tools again.