Rockstar almost never talks. So when Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier got invited into Rockstar North in Edinburgh and the studio’s bosses actually sat down on the record, I paid attention. And the line that stuck with me came from Aaron Garbut, one of Rockstar’s three heads of development and the art director behind this series for decades:
“There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head.”
That is the head of development of GTA 6, saying the game outgrew every single brain that built it. Not the interns. Not the leads. Nobody.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint
Where this comes from
Quick honesty note, because it matters: this story has two parts. The big one is Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover feature, “Inside the Making of Grand Theft Auto 6,” published October 14, 2026, which Bloomberg billed as the first time Rockstar openly discussed the game’s development. Schreier interviewed head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe and the three heads of development: Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut.
The Garbut quote above, and most of the fun details below, come from a follow-up video Schreier posted on October 19 with material that did not fit the cover story. IGN picked it up the same day, and the quote has been bouncing around Instagram ever since. Rockstar has not commented on the video’s details, and VG247 noted it was checking one of the anecdotes with the studio. The cover feature, though, is Rockstar itself talking, on the record.
The horse balls rule
So how does a game end up with details nobody catalogued? Garbut explained the model using the most famous example in the business: the shrinking horse testicles in Red Dead Redemption 2.
That detail was never on a features list. No art director assigned it. Schreier retold it like this: it was something a person, on their own, autonomously decided to build because they thought it was a cool detail and they had the time to work on it. Garbut confirmed GTA 6 runs on the same model. Individual developers and small teams keep slipping granular details into the world, details their own colleagues may never notice.
Scale is what turns that habit into a monster. Garbut said the art production team was five or six people on GTA 5. On GTA 6, it is 65. Teams own sections of the world and flesh out every street corner, and with thousands of people working that way for years, the details compound past the point where anyone can hold the full map in their memory. Schreier’s own guess, and he flagged it as a guess, is that not even the top developers know every tiny thing added to Vice City and its people. His conclusion is the one that matters to players: we will probably still be discovering details in this game years after launch.
The weapon wheel that ate years
The freedom cuts both ways, and my favorite story from the same interviews proves it. Rob Nelson told Schreier the team wanted to replace GTA’s weapon wheel with a limited, Red Dead style loadout. They spent months, if not years, trying a million different things. Schreier’s words: “They tried trays and webs and all sorts of different things.” After all that, they landed back on a weapon wheel. The final game just has a weapon wheel again.
Garbut told a similar one about the roads. GTA 6’s roads are significantly narrower than GTA 5’s, an early call made for denser traffic and realism. “All these things come back to bite you later,” he said, because narrower roads demanded more buildings and more density everywhere. One decision, thousands of hours of consequences. Multiply that by every system in the game and the Garbut quote stops sounding like a boast. It sounds like a weather report.
How a game gets too big for one head
The Bloomberg feature fills in the receipts. Per Bloomberg’s reporting, Rockstar now has 4,711 employees across 12 offices, up from 2,441 when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018. GTA 6 has been in development for more than eight years. It started life as “Project Americas,” a game meant to span large parts of North and South America, before being cut back to Miami and its surroundings, the Leonida we are getting. Some artists have been on this game since the first Miami research trip in 2015. Eleven years on one game.
Bloomberg also reported that Rockstar set up a Los Angeles studio of writers, producers and directors dedicated only to NPCs, the people walking around the world. Nelson admitted the early projections from that team were, in his word, “horrifying.” I wrote about the NPC obsession in my Edge magazine piece, and it keeps being the thread that connects everything: this game is not one team’s vision, it is thousands of specialists each going deeper than anyone can supervise. Coverage of the same Schreier material also reports hundreds of smaller interiors players can enter, which matches what Edge reported from its own time with the game.
The same visit produced the culture headlines, too. Kolbe said on the record: “We’re not going to finish this game by crunching,” a real shift for a studio with Rockstar’s history, and if you want the man himself, I profiled Jason Schreier in The Scene when this reporting landed.
My take
People read that Garbut quote as a warning. I read it as a promise.
A game that no single person fully knows is a game that cannot be finished in a weekend, or a month, or honestly maybe ever. Every corner of Leonida had somebody who cared about it enough to hide something there, and a lot of those somebodies never told anyone. That is exactly the kind of game I built this site and my channel to take apart. On November 19 I start with the first 30 minutes and a full map tour, and if Schreier is right, I will still be finding things in this world years from now. Everything confirmed so far lives in our GTA 6 hub, and I will keep updating it as the discoveries start.
So here is my question: what is the first tiny detail you are going hunting for on day one?
Sources
- Bloomberg Businessweek (Jason Schreier), “Inside the Making of Grand Theft Auto 6,” October 14, 2026
- Jason Schreier, “Some New Things I Learned About Grand Theft Auto VI And Rockstar,” YouTube, October 19, 2026
- IGN, “‘There’s No One Person That Has This Whole Thing in Their Head’ — GTA 6 Devs Had Freedom to Add Cool Features,” October 19, 2026
- GameSpot, “GTA 6 Will Feature Lots Of Small Details Like Red Dead’s Dynamic Horse Testicle Physics,” October 21, 2026
- VG247, “GTA 6 is so detailed no single Rockstar employee knows it all,” October 20, 2026
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