GTA 6 began as Project Americas, Rockstar tells Bloomberg

GTA 6 started life as Project Americas, a game meant to cover large parts of North and South America. Rockstar's own leaders said so in a long Bloomberg Businessweek feature by Jason Schreier, published on 14 October. Schreier interviewed them at Rockstar North in Edinburgh: the three heads of development Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe and technology chief Jonathon Ashcroft.

The project goes back to 2015, when Nelson took a group of staff to Miami on the first research trip. The original plan was to build it alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. As the western grew, Project Americas was pushed back by several years and later scaled down to Vice City and the land around it. By 2019 the team had the core of the story, Jason and Lucia as a couple living out a crime fantasy together.

The studio changed around the game. Rockstar went from 2,441 employees in 2018 to 4,711 across 12 offices, and most of them ended up on this one project. After co-founder Dan Houser left, the top creative job went to three people instead of one. Nelson told Bloomberg he knew some staff felt that meant too many cooks. Rockstar even set up a separate production team in Los Angeles, with its own writers, producers and directors, just to create content for the non-player characters.

Bloomberg also describes what that work looks like in play. Playing as Jason, you can text Lucia to meet in a park, hit the gym together or rob a convenience store side by side. Hooker recalled setting off for a story mission during a test session and never getting there: a road-rage fight, a robbery, a police chase and a stolen-goods deal took up about two hours.

The delays get the most candid account. Rockstar's leaders say no single problem caused them: the game simply needed more time. Kolbe made both calls to Strauss Zelnick (CEO of Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company). The second one, moving the game from May to November 2026, caught him off guard. "I think he said, 'You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding,'" Kolbe recalled. Once the team explained why, he accepted it.

On money, Rockstar still gives no figure. Kolbe rejected the widely repeated claim that the game cost more than $1.5 billion. Bloomberg's own conclusion is that GTA 6 is almost certainly the most expensive video game ever made.

Kolbe also spoke about working conditions. After the heavy overtime on Red Dead Redemption 2, she says leadership agreed not to repeat it. "It's not been perfect, but it's certainly better than Red Dead 2 was," she said. Garbut described the 2022 hack, when unfinished footage spread online, as feeling like "somebody's wading through your dirty washing".

For fans, the most hopeful line concerns what comes next. Hooker says the next Rockstar game will not take another eight years: "The engine, the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly." Bloomberg compares this to Vice City, which followed GTA III within a year because it reused that game's groundwork, though nobody promised a timeline. GTA 6 itself comes out on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.