EDINBURGH: For nearly 27 minutes last month, I sat enthralled while watching Jason and Lucia, the main characters of Grand Theft Auto VI, ascend a social ladder from a drug deal gone bad in a seedy tower block to a party with coked-out entrepreneurs christening their new office building. Beyond the self-assured roughnecks and fidgety jet-setters, there was a panorama of scenes in the extended look at the video game: stock-car racing, skydiving, bayou boating, kayaking, nightclub dancing and, of course, balletic violence.
When the lights came up inside Rockstar North’s building in Edinburgh, a group of studio leaders peered my way. At a loss for words, I looked down, held up my hand and asked for a moment. There was quiet, polite laughter.
I was wrestling with the sense of elation that comes from glimpsing a work of art that promises to marshal one’s full attention. A wave of positive emotion swept through the room, tears edging down faces.
That extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI was shared with the public on Netflix, building further anticipation for its Nov 19 release. The series, one drenched in violence and satirising American culture, is a virtual playground where you can blow up police cars or organise productions of Hamlet. The release of a new game is the equivalent of a fresh Beyoncé album or Martin Scorsese film, a rare monocultural moment in a fragmented world. Since Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013, it has sold 230 million copies and generated billions in revenue for Rockstar, its publisher.
“Most blockbusters have an opening weekend,” Geoff Keighley, the creator and host of the Game Awards, said in an email. “GTA has an opening decade.”
Grand Theft Auto VI, the subject of leaks this month, will be expansive: Vice City, its alluring interpretation of Miami, is twice the size of Los Santos, the version of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto V, according to Rockstar. The overall map, the studio said, is three times as large as the playable area of its previous game, Red Dead Redemption 2.
It also promises to be incredibly immersive. Unlike in other Grand Theft Auto games, a player in this one cannot whip out a shotgun or a rocket launcher and walk down the street without expecting the nonplayer characters to call the police.
Rob Nelson, who oversees Rockstar North with Aaron Garbut, said he considered Grand Theft Auto VI an evolution of what the studio achieved in 2018 with Red Dead Redemption 2, which told the story of a man unsettled by the erosion of the Wild West. That game’s systems were built to be responsive to a wide array of actions, whether the player was hunting animals, helping someone in hope of a reward or unrepentantly robbing that person instead.
“Once we managed to accomplish that level of interactive fidelity in a more sparsely populated version of America 100 years ago,” Nelson said, “we were already imagining what it would be like if we could do that at the scale and density of a modern environment.”
Fight and flight
Nelson picked up a controller and turned on Grand Theft Auto VI. “We are adding so much more depth and interactivity to the world,” he said while leading Jason around a safe house. “Here I am eating an apple, opening the fridge and drinking a smoothie. So this will increase my health temporarily for a while, allowing people to sort of role-play.” Exiting the apartment, Jason stooped down to pet a pedestrian’s dog. Nelson said you could buy pet snacks from convenience stores and dole them out if you wished.
As Jason walked past a tennis court, I asked whether there was a tennis minigame as in Grand Theft Auto V. Nelson said you could only pick up a racket and swat a ball.
“Of course we want to do everything, we want to have every mechanic that you can imagine,” Nelson said. “But we do have to carefully pick and choose what we think is best for our characters and our story and what we can handle creatively and technically.”
Nelson ducked Jason into a gym, where he walked past people on treadmills and stepped into a squat rack. Unlocking higher weights requires working out and a mastery of technique. By pressing down on the controller’s triggers, players can manage the rise and descent of the movement. Flub the rhythm and it is harder to get out of the hole, which results in stamina drain. Success has a material effect on the character.
“I hope that there will be people that want to get up, have a cup of coffee, shower, get dressed, go out for a little exercise,” Nelson said. His 80-hour play-through of the game in February included the main story and some optional goals with narrative ramifications. Routines can escalate quickly. “Interact with some people, explore, maybe get into some trouble,” he added. “Rob some places, make some money.”
It was time to check on Lucia, Nelson said. The camera shot into the air overlooking the city and then descended on her walking down a street.
I watched Lucia get into a verbal altercation and then a fight with a group of women. After knocking one woman’s sunglasses to the ground, Lucia scooped them up, put them on and sauntered away in style. A little later, Lucia linked up with Jason and robbed a convenience store. The two made their escape by jacking a motorcycle from some unlucky sap who called in the theft. (To steal older cars, you can smash their windows or jimmy their locks and hot-wire them. Newer cars will require a key cloner.)
Jason and Lucia are on the run in Grand Theft Auto VI, and to skate by, they will need to make money outside of the story missions. Beyond criminal activity, they can earn cash by racing monster trucks, scuba diving for treasure, playing pool and more.
Whether they do so as lovers or simply as partners in crime will be up to the player. Keeping the couple’s relationship strong enough for Lucia and Jason to hold hands when leaving a clothing store will require effort – hanging out, responding to texts. “It’s new for GTA, this idea of your actions having meaning in terms of how you treat your partner or how violent you are,” Nelson said.
While there is no right or wrong way to play, the world will react according to how the characters conduct themselves. If players stick up places efficiently and destroy security footage when necessary, Nelson said, they should generally be able to stay in front of the law. Going around guns blazing will make the police aggressive.
To raise the stakes, Nelson has the couple rob a bank. Things go sideways when a guard triggers an alarm, but they are able to get away with marked bills that will have to be taken to a fence. Back in their vehicle, Lucia shoots out the tyres of a trailing police car, causing it to spin out of control and flip over in a way that is nothing short of cinematic.
A seamless experience
Rockstar is well aware of the expectations surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI, which will be released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. “Some people didn’t like ‘GTA V’ and think ‘GTA IV’ was better, or ‘Red Dead 2’ it was too long, too slow,” Nelson said. “There are opinions on all of this stuff from every angle. You have to try and keep it in perspective.”
I asked if the studio created a strong female character to address a long-standing criticism of the series. Nelson denied that was the case. Rockstar initially considered making four playable characters – one more than the previous game – but worried that might make it hard to emotionally connect. That was when the idea of a playable relationship emerged.
“As soon as we had that Bonnie and Clyde concept,” Nelson said, “we knew it was the only way for us to go with this game.”
Nelson began his career in 2003 as a lead animator at Rockstar Toronto, one of the many studios within the publisher Rockstar Games, and quickly transitioned to a producer role. After working on The Warriors, based on the 1970s gang movie, Nelson moved to New York in 2008 to help on the first Red Dead Redemption and to wrap up work on The Ballad of Gay Tony, an expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV.
Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games and a creator of the Grand Theft Auto series, asked Nelson then to help glue the games together. “Get rid of the fades to black between gameplay and cutscene,” Nelson recalls Houser saying, “to try and make the experience as seamless as possible.”
‘A love letter’
Over the past decade, CD Projekt Red has been the only developer to come close to matching Rockstar’s level of open-world immersion. Among its games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt set a standard for open-world fantasy, and Cyberpunk 2077 proved that games could leverage the talent of Hollywood stars like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba. Their writing set a high bar for blockbuster games that Grand Theft Auto VI will be measured against.
Rupert Humphries, Rockstar North’s senior vice president for narrative, acknowledged that conspiracy theories became more mainstream during the game’s decade-long development. But some of the seismic events during that period – President Donald Trump’s rise to political power and the coronavirus pandemic – will not be directly addressed.
One of the game’s writers, Michael Wiafe, said, “I think if we can make a story about humanity where you are poking fun at greed and hubris and all these sorts of things that we can all agree are problematic, then I think that is a unifying thing.”
Depicting a wide cross-section of society meant on-the-ground research for Rockstar – visiting racetracks and nightclubs, riding along with police officers, meeting with owners of gun ranges. To make the game feel as authentic as possible, Nelson said, the studio interviewed people who were respected in all types of neighbourhoods; Rockstar hired some of them as well.
Humphries said he was proud the game showed all parts of life in Miami and South Florida. “Everything is there, and you can take this ride through it, and that is something to escape into,” he said. “It’s a sort of critique, but it’s also like a love letter.”
The plenitude in the game’s extended trailer put me in mind of capacious 19th-century novels and films like Nashville that presented a maximalist vision of human activity. Toward the end of my visit, Garbut, the series’s art director since Grand Theft Auto III, stopped by and emphasised the lack of visual shortcuts. “You can see these vehicles from the top of a skyscraper and then parachute down and see that it’s the actual vehicle you saw there,” he said. “All these things cascade all the way down.”
Similar rigour was applied to building the game’s nonplayer characters, known as NPCs. Their behaviour in Grand Theft Auto V, Nelson said, was quite simple: If you bumped into someone and he dropped an object, he would forget about it and walk away.
To make this world feel more believable, Rockstar built a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles that focused solely on creating more realised NPCs. Rather than use procedural generation to algorithmically mix and match body parts and clothes, the developers went for a bespoke approach.
“We art-directed each individual one of them,” said Garbut, who with Nelson also leads development for Rockstar Games.
Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar said, has well over 600,000 animations, compared with 55,000 animations in Grand Theft Auto V and 300,000 animations in Red Dead Redemption 2. Garbut emphasised the new game’s human-made craft.
“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Garbut said. “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.”
Transformative play
The inside of Rockstar North’s building in Edinburgh, which once housed a newspaper, is an architectural stunner. Its vaulted glass ceiling, ribbed by thin steel supports, floods the interior with natural light. Backlit panels around the ground floor depict characters from Grand Theft Auto VI.
During my visit, Phil Hooker, a head of development for Rockstar Games, reiterated that the goal was immersion. “We wanted, whether you’re on mission or off mission, for it to feel the same so you wouldn’t really see the structure of the game underneath,” he said.
With Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar hopes to retain cultural influence for another decade.
“We’re trying to reflect a sort of crazy, warped version of this American state and city – we always try to do that,” Nelson said. I asked what he would say to my literary friends who were not into gaming but were interested in this particular game. He replied, “I think this story has – if you want it – themes of hopefulness, elements of sacrifice versus selfishness, and it plays out asking questions about whether love can survive through this storm.”
Humphries said the series’s games were powerful because they gave people moments of serendipity.
“They’ll be driving down the street, the sun will hit a building in a way, and there’s a song playing on the radio,” he said. “There’s a sort of transcendental moment there. It’s transformative. And I think that with the tools we’ve got now making this new game, you could have that moment on a rooftop bar, or in a nightclub, or on an airboat in the swamps.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
