Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6 is one of the most highly anticipated game releases this year, or ever. The franchise is known for its massive scope and impressive attention to detail, but how is a game like GTA 6 actually made? In a new interview with Love magazine (via Kotaku), Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson said that part of the secret sauce with the GTA franchise is that many of its developers have been working together for a long time and have a “good sense of what they need to do.”
In terms of actually building the game, Nelson said the process begins by creating assets and systems, and then “roughing in content across all areas of development.”
More specifically, Nelson said GTA 6 was built through a series of eight-week milestones where select pieces of the game are compiled together. Then, the team evaluates those pieces, incorporates changes based on feedback, and then gets back to work on the next milestone.
“We work our way there, year after year, one obsessive day at a time, course-correcting as we go; always with the feeling we want the finished game to have firmly in mind, knowing that often we have to find that feeling, and trusting that, even if we haven’t found it yet, we will eventually,” he said.
Another way Rockstar gets a game like GTA 6 out the door is by working with a lot of people. Anyone who watched the credits roll on Rockstar’s last game, Red Dead Redemption II, is aware of just how many people worked on that game. For GTA 6, it wouldn’t be surprising if the headcount is even higher.
GTA 6 writing director James Horton said, “There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this.”
“It’s a question of giving the right people the resources they need to build something that’s not only vast and varied as a whole, but where every part rings true no matter how small it is, or how closely you look at it,” he said. “It needs to wash over you when you’re sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go; and it needs to be totally convincing if you decide to stop and pay close attention to any one of those conversations.”
Rockstar spun up a team in Los Angeles to work exclusively on NPCs, to help them feel more alive.
“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Rockstar’s Aaron Garbut told The New York Times. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”
Rockstar’s developers also visited strip clubs in Florida and did ride-alongs with police to help get the details right in its recreation of Miami for Vice City.
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. After a long period of silence, Rockstar has finally begun to reveal more details and show the game off. For lots more, be sure to read all of the new things we just learned about GTA 6.