Rockstar on the Making of GTA 6: Project Americas and Two Delays

Rockstar has talked on the record, for the first time, about how GTA 6 was made. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier spent a day at Rockstar North in Edinburgh and published a long feature on October 14, followed by a video on October 17. Head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe and the three heads of development — Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker — explained where the game started, why it took so long and what both delays looked like from the inside.

This is a late write-up. The Bloomberg piece is paywalled, so we waited until outlets under several different owners had reported the same details. Kotaku, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, VGC and DualShockers now have. Everything below comes from that coverage.

It started as Project Americas

The game’s code name was Project Americas. The first plan covered large parts of both North and South America. It was later cut back to Miami and the area around it, which became Vice City and the rest of Leonida. Several outlets note that Bloomberg does not say exactly when or why the scope shrank.

Work began earlier than most people assumed. Nelson and other senior staff made their first research trip to Miami in 2015. The plan was to build GTA 6 alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but as that game grew it pulled in most of the company, senior leadership included. GTA 6 slipped back several years as a result.

The same research groundwork shows up in what Rockstar told LOVE magazine earlier this month about the Florida trips, covered in our report on that interview.

Two delays, two phone calls

GTA 6 has been delayed twice: from Fall 2025 to May 26, 2026, then to November 19, 2026. Kolbe said she made both calls to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick herself. The first request was granted. The second, which moved the game to November, got a sharper reaction.

“I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,’” Kolbe recalled, as quoted by Kotaku. “But once we talked through why, he got it.”

That fills in the one part of the story nobody outside the companies had seen. Our earlier explainer on why GTA 6 was delayed twice worked from public statements and dates. Rockstar’s own account is consistent with it, and our delay tracker is unchanged: November 19 still stands.

The NPC problem and the price tag

PC Gamer’s account highlights one specific cause of the extra time: the amount of work needed for the game’s pedestrians. Rockstar described the projected NPC workload as frightening, and the studio set up a dedicated Los Angeles team of writers to handle it. That matches what Rockstar has said elsewhere about crowds, tracked on our NPC behaviour page.

On cost, Kolbe dismissed the widely repeated claim that GTA 6 cost $1.5 billion, according to GamesRadar+. She did not give a real figure, so the actual budget remains unknown.

The next game won’t take eight years

Hooker and Garbut both said the wait after GTA 6 will be shorter. According to Kotaku, VGC and GameSpot, they credited the engine, tools and team built during this project. Hooker said the studio can now grow sideways rather than simply bigger. Garbut said the deep changes to the engine are finished and will not be torn up again.

Garbut also spoke about the 2022 leak, calling it “weirdly invasive”, according to TechRadar. Rockstar’s position on that has not changed since its August statement.

How solid is this

These are named Rockstar executives speaking in an interview the studio granted, reported by Bloomberg’s most reliable Rockstar reporter. The details above appear in at least two outlets under different owners, with matching attributions. The caveat is the route: we have read the coverage, not the paywalled original.

None of it changes a status on the tracker. The feature is about history and process, not features. Some coverage mentions a timeframe for the online mode, but Rockstar staff did not announce one, so our online timing page stays at rumored. GTA 6 is still due on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.