Not Even Rockstar Games' Top Executives Know Everything in GTA 6

Fun fact: Not even the people who made Grand Theft Auto know everything in it, especially in Grand Theft Auto VI. The detail comes from a new Jason Schreier video, "Some New Things I Learned About Grand Theft Auto VI And Rockstar," posted on October 19, where he shares the bits that did not make his big Bloomberg feature. In Schreier's words, "individuals are given a little bit of autonomy to put in details and put in features and put in things that they think are cool." Art boss Aaron Garbut put it more bluntly. "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head."

That is not a knock on Rockstar Games. It is a feature of how it has and will probably always work. It is the same culture that, as Schreier put it plainly in his video, gave Red Dead Redemption 2 its infamous horse testicles that shrink in the cold. Yes, really.

One of the most infamous parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 was those weather-reactive horses. As Schreier tells it, that was not on any official feature list. "That was something that people or a person kind of on their own autonomously decided, I'm going to do this because I think it's a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it," he said. Nobody ordered the horse anatomy. Someone just had the time, talent and idea. Schreier expects GTA 6 to be full of that sort of thing, right down to the inevitable flood of videos. He said there will be "no shortage of YouTube videos titled the 99 coolest details you missed in Grand Theft Auto 6."

Schreier said "there are a few artists at Rockstar who have actually been working on GTA 6 for more than 11 years since 2015, if not earlier," adding, "Imagine working on a single game for more than 11 years. That to me seems a little crazy."

The amount of time developers have had to work on GTA 6 is why the game is effectively the end result of millions of tiny decisions. Garbut pointed to one. The roads in GTA 6 are, in Schreier's recap, significantly narrower than they were in Grand Theft Auto V. It sounds minor. It is not. "All these things sort of come to bite you later," Garbut said, "because denser roads, narrower roads mean a lot more buildings, mean a lot more just kind of constructing around that concept."

The weapon wheel shows how far that perfectionism goes. Rob Nelson told Schreier the team wanted limited loadouts like Red Dead Redemption 2 and worried a traditional wheel would only "remind people of what they can't actually do, what they can't carry." So they tried to replace it. Schreier said they spent "months, if not years, trying a million different things," including "trays and webs and all sorts of different things." They even tried having no wheel at all. After all of that, they went back to a version of the weapon wheel anyway.

Put those together and two things start to make sense: why GTA 6 may have taken as long as it did, and why people will keep finding things in it for years. When dozens if not hundreds of developers each have a license to add the small touches they care about, the game fills with detail no single person can track.

Of course, this only works because of the scale we have already covered. A team this large, on a timeline this long, with the resources behind the most expensive game Bloomberg can find, can afford to let people chase cool ideas. It is the same machine that took eight years and a studio reset to build. It is the same one that has rivals clearing out of November. The autonomy is a luxury that only a project this big can pay for.

So this is the part of the wait that stings in a good way. Somewhere in GTA 6 is a detail some artist added years ago just because they thought people would find it funny if they ever do find it, with nobody else but them even knowing it is there.

Those are the things that will make the game feel like they're worth an nth playthrough come its launch on November 19.