GTA 6 Took Eight Years, Three Bosses, Two Delays and a Stunned CEO to Make

It's common knowledge that making Grand Theft Auto VI took more than eight years. What's new is how much it took for Rockstar Games to get to the November 19 launch and the latest Bloomberg feature by Jason Schreier shows just how the award-winning studio had to transform itself just to finish it. The studio put its entire workforce on one game, handed the top job to three people instead of one and delayed the release thrice, including a late slip that stunned its own parent company's CEO.

Let's start with the biggest structural change. For years Rockstar juggled several games at once across its offices. For GTA 6, it pointed the bulk of the company at a single project, a focus that explains why one game could swallow eight years and, by Bloomberg's account, almost certainly the biggest budget in gaming.

The people in charge changed too. After Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018, several senior staff left, including co-founder Dan Houser, who had served as the lead writer on most of the company's games. We covered his reflections on all of it in his recent IGN interview. In his absence, Rockstar gave the head-of-development title to three veterans, Aaron Garbut, Phil Hooker and Rob Nelson, rather than a single director. Some staff grumbled about too many cooks. Nelson told Bloomberg he knew people felt that way, though he argues a single leader brings its own problems.

Then came the delays. The first GTA 6 trailer told fans the game would arrive in 2025, a date Rockstar's leaders say they believed at the time even as staff on the ground stayed skeptical. As the deadline neared, the team told head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe that a delay was necessary. She called Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick to break the news, first a slip to May 2026. Months later she had to call again, this time pushing the game to November, which flabbergasted Zelnick. "I think he said, 'You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding,'" Kolbe recalls.

He came around once they explained why. He has since called delays "a wise investment."

For all the time it took, Rockstar's leaders insist the next game will come faster. They say GTA 6 is a foundation they can build on, with an engine, tools and a team that let them move more quickly, so their next release will not take another eight years. They point to their own history as proof. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was built in under a year because it stood on the work already done for Grand Theft Auto III. "The last 30 years has been practice for where we got to here," Garbut told Bloomberg. "But now it's done, and we're not going to rip it apart."

Former Rockstar North lead developer Obbe Vermeij shared similar sentiments in the past although much of his thoughts on accelerated video game development laid in the use of AI, which GTA 6 won't use it at all.

With that said, the more we know of GTA 6 before November 19, the more the herculean effort to bring Vice City and Leonida to life becomes clearer. It's not just the money at this point, It's the studio reorganization, a changing of the guard and at least three hard delays, all in service of a game Rockstar could not afford to get wrong.

Whether the promise of a faster next game holds is a question for another year. The result of this eight-year grind that has already made an impact on the entire video game industry reaches players when GTA 6 launches on November 19.