•Rockstar Game has officially confirmed that Grand Theft Otomatis 6 began development under a vastly different, more ambitious scope — a revelation contained in a new Bloomberg report by reporter Jason Schreier.
The feature, published midway through October 2026, offers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the making of what Rockstar has called “the biggest video game of all time.” While fans have speculated for years about why development took so long, this is among the first times the studio has publicly detailed the concrete issues it faced.
GTA 6 started as a different game
Prior to Bloomberg’s report, rumors circulated that Grand Theft Otomatis 6 began as a project featuring multiple protagonists spanning North and South America. That so-called “Project Americas” is now officially confirmed by Rockstar — and helps explain part of the delay.
According to the report, Grand Theft Otomatis 6 began too ambitiously, with an unrealistic scope that forced the developer to push release back by several years.
The pursuit of realism
Beyond the development timeline, the report details how difficult it was to pin down the game’s level of detail. Co-studio head Rob Nelson told Bloomberg that Rockstar knew impressive graphics would naturally raise player expectations for realism — but the team struggled to define exactly what that meant in practice.
Nelson pointed to a seemingly simple act as an example: drinking a beer. Would players need to shop for alcohol first? Would they have to get up, open the fridge, grab the beer, and manually open the bottle? “How far into the weeds would each individual mechanic get?” he asked.
The report notes that much of the game remained unfinished throughout development, forcing design decisions to rely on significant “guesswork.” Once ideas were settled, building what Bloomberg described as “complicated artificial intelligence systems” still took years of additional work.
The pandemic and Rockstar’s working environment
Rockstate says productivity suffered during the period when workers stayed home. Some aspects of game development simply cannot be done without people gathered in the same location: developers couldn’t set up a high-quality performance capture system at home, and even if they could, they would still need other people to perform.
Due to privacy concerns, remote workers also were barred from accessing Rockstar’s servers and tools — constraints that hampered progress despite reports suggesting productivity can rise with remote work.
Another unexpected hurdle was the studio’s development structure. The report describes a framework featuring three heads of development supervision, each bringing their own hesitations or conflicting ideas. Nelson said workers were not fans of this hierarchy — but he also noted that similar complaints arise even when games are led by a single person.
Beyond these three prominent factors, the Bloomberg report contains many additional details worth reading in full.
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