French magazine Love interviewed part of the team making GTA 6, and the result is one of those rare moments where Rockstar actually explains, with names attached, how it builds a game this size. The conversation, reported by Kotaku, brings together Rockstar North’s head of development, its art director, its open-world writing director, and part of the narrative team.
Image: Rockstar Games.
The game is built in 8-week blocks
Rob Nelson, Rockstar North’s head of development, described the method behind the work. Instead of one giant single timeline, the team splits development into short cycles, repeated year after year:
“We build the game up through a series of eight-week milestones where we pull agreed-upon sections of the game together. 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.”
— Rob Nelson, Rockstar North head of development
According to Nelson, much of the studio’s senior team has worked together for a “loooooooong time,” which helps everyone have a clear sense of what needs to get done each cycle.
Who spoke to Love
- Rob Nelson Head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North
- James Horton Open-world writing director
- Aaron Garbut Art director (the same one we already cited in our GTA III history chapter)
- Rupert Humphries Senior VP of narrative
- Alexa D’Agostino Writer, who worked on part of Lucia’s writing
A Florida research trip, with real cops and gang members
The team didn’t build the game’s fictional Florida from photos and maps alone. According to the report, a small group led by Nelson and Garbut made a first trip from Miami through the surrounding area and the Florida Keys, all the way to Key West, and a larger group later returned for closer study. Developers rode along with locals, police officers, and even gang members, to understand parts of the state a tourist would never normally see.
“Many of the people were welcoming, though some of their stories and the details they shared were quite frightening.”
— Aaron Garbut, Rockstar North art director
James Horton, the open-world writing director, summed up the philosophy behind all that work:
“There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this.”
— James Horton, open-world writing director
Jason and Lucia: flawed on purpose
Writer Alexa D’Agostino said she drew on women she knows to build Lucia, including her own mother, from Newark. She describes the protagonist as spirited and self-assured, saying she believes “the protagonist could stand alongside Arthur Morgan and Niko Bellic” among Rockstar’s most memorable leads.
Jason, on the other hand, was written with deliberately ambiguous motivation: the team left it open whether he was pushed into crime or chose that path because of his own personality and upbringing, leaving it to the player to interpret. The idea, according to the team, is that both of them are “tough but vulnerable: sometimes they’re right, sometimes they make mistakes, but they learn from each other.”
Satire that avoids literal copying
Rupert Humphries, senior VP of narrative, explained that the team avoids recreating reality literally, preferring to build “exaggerated versions” of real-world phenomena, like conspiracy theories. The game’s political content includes fake campaign ads, robocalls, and satirical radio shows, in the style that’s marked the franchise since its earliest games.
