Rockstar Flew a Helicopter Over a Beyoncé Concert to Research GTA 6

One of the better stories to come out of Grand Theft Auto VI's press run is that a Rockstar Games director spent a day in a helicopter and accidentally crashed a Beyoncé concert from the air. It comes from the same LOVE Magazine interview behind the feature on Jason and Lucia and a fan has since lined it up with real Miami film permits to build a timeline of how obsessively Rockstar researched the game, starting with the helicopter.

Aaron Garbut, co-studio head and head of development at Rockstar North, told LOVE that research begins with small teams going out and immersing themselves. On one trip, a group of art directors spent a day filming from a helicopter, flying low over the Everglades mangroves before swinging over downtown and the beach. They ended up hovering over a stadium in the middle of a Beyoncé concern, and Garbut figured they might have made the local news. The X user @OfficialJoelF matched the story to a film permit and placed it at Marlins Park, now LoanDepot Park, around April 2016.

It didn't stop there. Garbut described small groups driving out of Miami through the surrounding towns and down the Keys to Key West, hanging out with locals that included both cops and gang members and soaking up the extremes of wealth and poverty that give the city its character. It wasn't until much later that Rockstar brought in larger teams. This intimate approach is how, as the magazine puts it, Rockstar built Leonida one obsessive day at a time.

The October 2019 permit is interesting because it lists one of its locations as Liberty Square. Liberty City is Rockstar's long-running fictional stand-in for New York, so a Rockstar permit naming "Liberty Square" suggest, that, at first glance, Rockstar was researching the setting for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The theory is not pulled from nowhere, to be fair. There is the old "Project Americas" rumor that the upcoming Grand Theft Auto sequel began life as a sprawling multi-city game before Rockstar scaled things back. There is also the cancelled Liberty City expansion for Grand Theft Auto V, whose files turned up in the enormous data leak that circulated last month, with a map larger than the one in GTA IV. Finally, Rockstar has a habit of tucking secondary spaces into its games, from North Yankton in GTA V to Guarma in Red Dead Redemption 2. A non-Leonida area is not far-fetched on paper.

However, Edison Courts, Joe Moretti Apartments and Liberty Square are not New York sites. They are public housing developments in Miami's own Liberty City. The permit was filed through Take-Two Interactive's New York office, which is simply where the company is registered, for locations that sit in Miami.

So where does that leave Liberty City in GTA 6? As a theory and only a theory. Nothing in the interview, the permits or any official material points to a playable Liberty City or any other city for that matter, in the base game or as post-launch content. The multi-map idea leans entirely on old rumors and leaked cancelled work.

The verified story is the better one anyway. A studio so committed to a fictional version of Florida that its directors flew over a Beyoncé concert by accident, hung around with cops and gang members and drove the Keys for atmosphere. It's no wonder then that there's so much to do and so many places to explore in GTA 6 based on what we've seen so far.

Whether Liberty City ever shows up after November 19, the decade of research behind Leonida is real, documented and, to be honest, a little unhinged.