Grand Theft Auto VI exclusive – The state that never sleeps

Every morning, the 900 or so people who work at Rockstar North, the storied and highly guarded game studio in Edinburgh, pass an enormous floor-to-ceiling mural in the lobby of their building. Amid an assortment of Rockstar logos and artwork, close to ground level, is a small slogan that reads: 'PARANOIA IS GOOD'. This is a building that has long dealt in secrets. Before Rockstar moved in, it housed The Scotsman newspaper. Once a place devoted to uncovering secrets, it is now devoted to keeping them.

That's because, despite what the series' swaggering Americana might suggest, this is one of the principal places in which Grand Theft Auto VI, the most anticipated video game of the decade, has been made. The secrecy surrounding the game has only sharpened the appetite for it. For years, every scrap of information has been extrapolated from and argued over. To the dismay of its creators, development has also been punctured by extraordinary leaks, including at least one accompanied by threats of blackmail. Here, paranoia is, if not a good thing, at the very least an occupational precaution.

It is surprising, then, to be invited inside a few weeks before the game's release and find not an atmosphere of siege or last-minute frenzy but one of apparent calm. The building is spacious and bright. We pass an open-plan library where old issues of Edge rub spines with Time, The New Yorker and shelves of art books, then climb several flights of stairs to the office of Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development.

Nelson, grave-faced but friendly, wearing all black, with grey-flecked stubble, settles into a leather-and-chrome Eames chair while we perch on a burnt-orange sofa facing a pair of expansive wall-mounted TVs. In the past, Rockstar has carefully stage-managed encounters such as this. For previews of previous GTAs, one team member played the game while a publicist read from a pre-prepared script, further evidence of the paranoia that can take hold when an artist is working on something the entire world is desperate to see.

Today, however, Nelson has no script and, apparently, no plan. For the next 90 minutes he simply plays the current build, following his nose, confident that the game's systems will hold together wherever he pushes them, that this world's glories will glint and shimmer no matter which angle he approaches from. It is an extraordinary demonstration not of paranoia but of trust – in the game, in the team that built it, perhaps even in us.

Nelson picks up the controller and lets Grand Theft Auto VI speak for itself.

We begin inside a small apartment shared by Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, partners in crime, and, if the player so wishes, in love. Beyond its windows lies an absurdly vast and densely observed world that, until this moment, has been known to us only through trailers and screenshots. Playing as Jason – who, like Lucia, took "a long time" to cast – Nelson pours a stamina-boosting cup of coffee, swigs a health-buffing protein shake, then steps out into the boiling heat of the Leonidan sidewalk.

An opportunistic seagull goose-steps towards some food scraps on the concrete before flapping away in fear and irritation as Jason stomps too close. A muscular man approaches, walking a nuisance dog tethered by a retractable leash. Nelson angles the camera towards the man and lets Jason stare a little too long. "What the fuck are you looking at?"

The first thing that strikes you about Leonida is not its scale, although that comes soon enough. The map is roughly twice the size of GTAV's; Rockstar says its total landmass, including Vice City and the surrounding areas, is nearly as large as the playable maps of GTAIV, GTAV and RDR2 combined. But acreage is an increasingly blunt measure of an open world's ambition. At a time when players are accustomed to hearing about landscapes enlarged through procedural generation, breadth alone is no longer especially meaningful.

Image credit: Rockstar Games

Image credit: Rockstar Games

What is startling about GTAVI is the handmade density of the place. The game contains "an order of magnitude more interiors" than its predecessors, Aaron Garbut, also a head of development and co-studio head, tells us. "Every back alley is as densely detailed and interesting as the others. You can go anywhere, any random location, and so many people have thought about that location." Even after literally years spent exploring increasingly dense versions of the game, Garbut is still, he says, encountering locations he had not seen previously.

Those places are built not merely as blank rooms, but as evidence of entire lives. Houses have inhabitants; inhabitants leave traces. Photographs sit on walls, possessions accumulate on tables, living rooms and kitchens acquire the disorder of the individuals who use them. Teams of architects, artists and designers build up these interiors in layers, with the result that entering an unfamiliar environment feels, more than ever before, like an act of trespass.

Garbut recalls how, during a play session earlier this morning, he wandered into a house he had never visited before. One room contained affectionate family photographs of a dog. In the next room he discovered what the animal had been doing while left alone. "The whole place was trashed," he says. "There was shit in the corner, smeared around a bit."

It is in moments such as this that the invisible scale of Rockstar's work becomes apparent. The team had originally created a character reaction to an unpleasant smell for a particular piece of explorable content. More recently, the developers decided to turn it into a broader system, allowing other locations to provoke varying degrees of disgust. When Jason entered this particular house, without any bespoke scene having been written for it, he began to grimace and recoil. A system, built for one purpose, had collided with another and produced a tiny piece of impromptu performance.

This same philosophy governs the streets. Rather than relying chiefly on procedural systems to assemble interchangeable crowds, Rockstar established an entire Los Angeles-based team of writers, directors and producers devoted to making Leonida's NPCs more individually realised. The studio art-directed every one of them, creating around 600,000 animations, but appearance is only the surface. These pedestrians are assigned personality traits that help determine how they respond: temperament, aggression, where they are, what they have seen, and how the player has behaved towards them.

Different districts have their own demographic and professional textures. Nelson describes the process of building Leonida's population as repeatedly asking: "Who's going to be aggressive? How many people are going to go for a weapon? How many are going to test me?" The old GTA pedestrian, a kind of moving prop waiting to panic when the player points a gun, has here splintered into a kaleidoscopic range of possible reactions.

Back on the sidewalk, that abstraction suddenly becomes practical. The man with the dog has decided that Jason's stare constitutes a test. He squares up, then unclips the leash from the animal's collar. Nelson turns and runs. The dog gives chase. A flock of pigeons bursts into the air. Finally, the animal loses interest and trots back to its owner. Jason slows to a walk, selects a pack of cigarettes from his inventory, lights one, takes a drag, and continues down the street.

On the opposite side of the road, Nelson spots an arrest taking place. A suspect is being cuffed by two police officers, who have left their vehicles unattended. He sneaks up to one, clicks the boot open, pulls out a shotgun and slings it onto his back, before walking on, leaving a puff of cigarette smoke curling in the air. We have been watching for three minutes.

Nelson joined Rockstar in 2003 because he wanted to work on this series. Living in Toronto and only four years into his career, he had been astonished by GTAIII: "Like everybody else in the world at that time, I think – jaw on the floor, looking at this thing and going, 'How have they done this?' The scope of it, but also the vibe of it."

When Rockstar Toronto told him it had no need for another animator or character artist, he replied: "I'll do whatever". Hearing that the studio might need environment artists, Nelson and his roommate spent a long weekend constructing a late-'70s New York alleyway, complete with burned-out cars, inspired by The Warriors, an adaptation of which was then in development. "We sent it in, basically saying: we're serious, and we can make environments too." Both were hired.

At the time, individual Rockstar studios could still make medium-sized games with teams of 50 or 60 people, although Rockstar North, working on the considerably larger GTAIV, already employed more. Nelson became a producer, and watched that model gradually disappear. Even with its larger team, Rockstar North needed help to complete GTAIV; developers from other studios were brought in, a process repeated on Red Dead Redemption. "It was the beginning of moving around and blending these teams together that had previously been fairly siloed," Nelson says.

The later versions of GTAV exposed another limit. New hardware could increase draw distances, traffic and pedestrian density, but the underlying simulation remained largely fixed. "You couldn't tear it apart and get in there and rework the traffic system or the law system," Nelson says. With RDR2, Rockstar deliberately began doing exactly that, rebuilding the open world around richer interactive systems of crime, witnesses, NPC behaviour and player interaction. By 2015, while that game was still deep in production, the team was already considering how those lessons might carry forward to its flagship series.

That same year, Nelson led a small group travelling to Miami to consider what a return to Vice City might look and feel like, identifying locations and aspects of Florida culture for larger research teams to explore later. The state was settled upon relatively quickly, its dense cities, swamps and varied landscapes offering obvious possibilities. The earliest work concentrated on place rather than plot. Rockstar deliberately held back on committing to its Bonnie-and-Clyde-style story until RDR2 was complete. Only then, as the bulk of the company turned towards the new game, did the shape of Jason and Lucia's story begin to click into place. For several years, the two projects had overlapped, one teaching Rockstar how to build the other.

Some of those lessons have changed the underlying rhythms of GTA. The generously wide roads and highways of GTAV, designed to make driving and turning easier, have been narrowed to feel, as Nelson puts it, "a more believable size". The brisk day-night cycle of the previous game has also been extended substantially. Sunsets now linger and nights stretch out, providing a broader canvas for whatever you hope to accomplish under cover of darkness.

The change is partly an attempt to avoid a kind of temporal uncanny valley. When the team tested GTAVI using GTAV's timings, Nelson says, "everything felt too fast" for a world rendered at this new level of fidelity. The same principle applies to the characters who inhabit it. "As the resolution of the worlds goes up, I think there are things you can't get away with in the same way," he says. "If you want a pedestrian population to behave believably, and you can stand in front of them and produce an automatic shotgun out of nowhere and they don't react, then that doesn't work. That barely held in GTAV, where you could literally produce one of those weapons in front of somebody and they would not react unless you aimed it at them. Only then would they run. To me, that was already showing its age in GTAV at that level of resolution."

In GTAVI, walking around holding a shotgun can be enough to disturb the peace. Pedestrians notice how you are carrying it: slung over your back is one thing; carried in your hands is another. Crowds edge away or scatter, while other characters may challenge you. The simulation is attentive, too, to whether anyone sees what you are doing. That does not mean every indiscretion immediately triggers a police chase. You can drop the weapon, and the game allows a degree of latitude before behaviour crosses the threshold into a wanted level. The aim is not to turn Leonida into a place where minor infractions bring the full machinery of the law down upon you, but to give an authentic sense of how information travels organically through the world.

RDR2 had a profound influence on the team's narrative ambitions, too. GTAVI introduces a system called the 'Criminal Profile', which tracks Jason and Lucia's behaviour on a scale from 'Professional' to 'Irredeemable', represented by angel and devil icons. Combat need not always end in death. A calculating criminal might incapacitate an enemy rather than kill them, or attempt threats and intimidation before resorting to violence. Those who shoot first and ask questions later will develop a violent profile. These choices are not merely cosmetic, either. Rockstar says that your Criminal Profile will influence how Jason and Lucia's story unfolds.

Similarly, the couple's relationship is, to a degree, yours to define. As in GTAV, it's possible to switch between characters whenever the narrative allows, but where Franklin, Michael and Trevor were primarily opportunistic and self-serving, Jason and Lucia are bound together by an emotional history as well as a professional one. Their closeness is measured on a four-point scale, typically increasing the more time you spend together: taking walks on the beach, cycling, working out at the gym (once they have purchased membership), or simply driving around, one at the wheel, the other swiping at their phone.

The roleplay elements, while consequential, operate within a relatively narrow band of possibility. You can choose what kind of criminal you are, but not whether you are one. Similarly, you can define the closeness and intimacy of Jason and Lucia's relationship, perhaps even its legal status (Nelson refuses to confirm or deny whether the couple can marry), but they cannot turn fully away from one another. They are partners in crime, on the run together; you cannot give it all up to become a yoga instructor.

Quitting crime is, however, a fundamental theme of the authored storyline. Jason and Lucia are professional thieves, but unlike in previous GTA games, where the goal was simplistic – to amass wealth, cars, homes and status by any means necessary – this couple's motivations are more sophisticated, perhaps reflecting a development team that is older and increasingly reflective about life's purpose. "These games, maybe some people think, 'Oh, they're power fantasies'," Nelson says. "Sure. But what if these characters want something else?"

Rockstar began exploring this question more deliberately in RDR2. Lead character Arthur Morgan could accumulate money, but the game asked what he was willing to do with it. "Do I go and spend it myself, on cool outfits and horses and saddles?" Nelson says. "Or do I go and give it to my adopted family in the game?" The point was to make the player reckon with "selfishness versus selflessness", ensuring that Arthur was "not just that character in the narrative; he's that character all the time."

GTAVI takes that idea much further. Jason and Lucia may want money, but they also want things from one another, and perhaps a life beyond the one they currently lead. "We start them wanting to be together, and wanting to give this relationship of theirs another shot," Nelson says. "But, as the game progresses, it's yours to keep or yours to lose." The question is no longer simply how much you can take from the world, but what kind of life you are trying to build inside of it.

To begin with, however, much of that life is spent scurrying around, committing petty crimes and trying not to get caught. In previous GTAs, the player could often feel almost godlike, with the police little more than an inconvenience until the wanted level climbed high enough. GTAVI deliberately makes criminality feel precarious. The fantasy is no longer one of striding through the city with an invisible arsenal, but of sulking through back alleys, abandoning vehicles, and trying to avoid the warm beam of a helicopter searchlight.

Image credit: Rockstar Games

Image credit: Rockstar Games

The police response is built around what the world knows about you. A 'heat' system tracks the information police have gathered: your physical description, whether you were working alone or with a partner, what you were wearing, whether CCTV captured you, what weapon you were carrying. Those details are represented by icons at the top of the screen, effectively showing the contents of the police report you are trying to outrun. If witnesses saw two people committing the crime, splitting up from your partner can remove that identifying feature. Change your clothes and you no longer match the description as closely. Drop the weapon and another piece of evidence disappears. Escape is no longer merely a matter of waiting for stars to evaporate, but a process of making yourself progressively less recognisable.

Even stealing a car now carries uncertainty. You no longer always need to drag somebody from the driver's seat; some will panic and flee. Others, however, will not. Pick the wrong driver and you may discover that they are armed and prepared to fight back. The vehicle itself can create problems, too. A newer, expensive car may contain a tracker that continues broadcasting your position; successfully stealing almost any vehicle risks the owner calling in a report behind you. Every apparently simple criminal act has acquired a small halo of possible consequences.

During a botched robbery, for example, Nelson flees on a stolen motorcycle with Lucia riding pillion. In these moments the player can switch between them, handing responsibility for the getaway to the other character – "It's AI," Nelson jokes, "but the good, old-fashioned sort" – while taking control of the passenger to shoot at pursuing cars. Up ahead, police radio to one another and lay a stinger strip across the road, almost invisible when driving at speed at night. Nelson fails to spot it. The motorcycle's front tyre blows, and the couple are hurled over the handlebars. They scramble to their feet and limp away, only for a nearby K9 unit to join the pursuit. The Alsatian closes the gap almost immediately and pins Jason to the ground as everyone in Nelson's office watching things unfold urges him not to shoot it.

What gives these encounters their intoxicating energy is that the police are only one source of disruption. Chaos is a third participant in every situation. A pedestrian you are robbing for his wallet might attack you when you turn your back on them; a holdup in a gas station might go south when a shopper decides to play the hero. Sometimes, though, it's just an impromptu invitation to stop what you're doing and join a different dance. Later, during another escape, Nelson is accelerating along a highway in an elderly station wagon when a group of youths in a customised 4x4 with purple underglow lighting pulls alongside. They wind down the window, taunting and challenging him to a street race. He initially ignores them. They persist until, in effect, he is bullied into accepting.

Nelson's vehicle, best suited to ferrying families around, is hopelessly outmatched. As the 4x4 surges ahead, its passenger climbs halfway out of the window and perches on the door frame, his arms braced on the roof, screaming insults back into the wind. It has nothing to do with the crime Nelson was trying to escape, and everything to do with the kind of world Rockstar has built: one heavily seeded with semi-scripted encounters and personalities eager to derail whatever plan you thought you were following.

Not every diversion asks you to raise your pulse. The game features fully functioning bus and train systems. Phil Hooker, a third lead who shares the job title head of development and the person responsible for driving the game towards stability, admits that he now spends much of his time waiting for buses: checking that they arrive when expected, then riding them across Leonida and watching the world pass by. "I'm obsessed with making sure they always turn up," he says. "So, anywhere in the middle of playing, I'll just go: right, we're going to get the bus to where we're going. I've memorised all of the routes."

More than any previous entry, this is a game designed to absorb the peculiar interests and habits of millions of different players. "You don't want to feel like you're foisting things on the player and then have them feel like they want to reject those things," Nelson says. "It's more about trying to let people lean into the way they want to play."

The ambition is not merely to offer a greater number of activities as the game progresses, but to let players settle into different rhythms of life within the same world, according to their tastes and interests. "You can really make the game what you want it to be at the time," Garbut says. "Whether that's more of a roleplay experience where you're buying cigarettes and beer in the shop and going on the train for the day, or going to a club. You can have your life in the game."

A project of this scale, and with so many opportunities for player expression, presents an obvious artistic problem. GTAVI has been assembled over many years from thousands of separate creative decisions that somehow have to add together to form a single, convincing world. Nelson says that some of the groups responsible for individual parts of Leonida are comparable to teams that, earlier in Rockstar's history, might have made an entire game.

Although developers from almost every discipline work across the company's studios, certain teams take the lead on particular systems: staff at Toronto, for example, have played a leading role in world population and research, while the San Diego team has helped drive the development of ambient and interactive events. Yet the ambition is that none of those joins should show. "It's this massive thing made by thousands of pairs of hands over many, many years," Nelson says, "but you still want it eventually to feel like it was made by one set of hands."

Part of the answer lies in Rockstar's formidable institutional memory. Many of the studio's most senior developers have worked together for decades, gradually learning each other's strengths as the company's formerly independent studios were pulled together on increasingly enormous projects. "We're old," Garbut says. "Some of us, anyway. We've been doing this a long time." For GTAVI, individual groups were consequently able to take substantial ownership of their areas without waiting for constant instruction from above. "The teams individually had a strong idea of what they wanted to evolve," Nelson says. "It didn't need to come from us saying, 'We need to do this', or 'We need to do that'."

The separate strands are pulled together through relentless play. Rockstar works in roughly six-to-eight-week milestones, concentrating on discrete areas before stabilising a build and playing it intensively. Specialists scrutinise their own work, while a smaller group considers the game holistically, producing "thousands and thousands" of notes. Ideas are then revised, discarded or sent back through the machine. Garbut describes the process as "constant iteration and regrouping": teams separate, push an idea in different directions, then overlap again.

Unexpectedly, there is no immutable bible defining what GTAVI must be. Early design documents were written, Nelson admits, but they became "out of date quite quickly". Instead, the team found that "the game tells you what it needs". That applies even to satire, one of the series' defining qualities and, in a project built over so many years, perhaps the hardest to keep fresh as presidents change, scandals pass, and cultural fashions evaporate. Rather than working from a fixed comic thesis, Rockstar lets the humour grow out of the places it has built.

Once a region's politics, demographics, gangs, aspirations and anxieties are established, the jokes begin to accumulate around them. "It develops somewhat naturally once we've decided where we're roughly going to take you, and what elements of society or culture we want to satirise or have fun with," Nelson says. Besides, GTA's satire has always depended as much on recognition as ridicule. Observe a place closely enough, the thinking seems to go, and America's absurdities will depict themselves.

One team works on brands and billboards, another group writes radio advertising, another one produces television shows, while pedestrian and mission writers feed in their own observations. A town might be unusually patriotic, contain a biker gang that loves the police and be in the middle of a mayoral race; from there, the satire spreads outward into campaign ads, characters, overheard conversations and even the objects found inside otherwise incidental rooms.

"You try to make it feel 360," Nelson says. As with the rest of the game, ideas are pitched, tested, edited or abandoned, the humour emerging from the particularities of a place rather than from a single top-down comic agenda.

Sam Houser, once one of the series' most visible public faces and now a more private figure, remains integrally involved in every aspect of the game's creative development. Nelson resists the suggestion that the company's president functions as a Rick Rubin-like 'taste director', describing a more comprehensive role. From the outset, he says, Houser helps shape the direction of the game, discussing the layout of the map with Garbut, developing characters and story elements, and participating in major creative decisions. As development progresses, he and Nelson regularly play the game together, picking out hitches and opportunities for improvement.

"Sam and I will identify problems or issues that we then solve with and across the teams," Nelson explains. The pair spend a couple of weeks evaluating each milestone, generating feedback that covers everything from lighting, animation and audio to narrative, tone and game mechanics. These are then sorted and passed to the relevant teams, who work through the problems before the process begins again. Repeated throughout development, alongside similar reviews conducted by individual teams, this relentless cycle of scrutiny and revision helps maintain a consistent creative vision across the sprawling project.

That is the paradox at the heart of GTAVI. No single person can plausibly hold all of Leonida in their head: not its multitude of inhabitants, its interiors and weather systems, its jokes, shops, radio stations, traffic, crimes, arguments, dogs and discarded cigarette packets. The coherence comes instead from a group repeatedly looking at the same enormous thing and asking whether it still feels coherent. After ten years of accumulation, iteration and argument, thousands of pairs of hands leave behind the impression of one.

For all the effort spent insulating the work from outside noise, nobody at Rockstar is oblivious to the expectation waiting beyond the building. Garbut says he feels better about GTAVI than any project he has worked on before. The difficulty, after the triumphs of GTAV and RDR2, was that meeting the existing standard would not be enough. "We can't just trot out something that's what people might expect, or that was the easy thing to do," he says. "We've not compromised on the scale, the detail, the interactivity, the story, the open world." His metaphor for reaching the end is characteristically excessive, but perhaps appropriate to the game's grandeur: "I feel like we've built a pyramid on Everest."

Hooker is circumspect about what happens when the game is released into the world on November 19. "I can't guess the public reaction," he says. What matters internally is that the game has arrived somewhere the team recognises. Nobody could have described the finished GTAVI ten years ago; much of its form emerged through the process of playing and following what worked. But the ideas carried forward from RDR2 – a reactive world, systems that overlap rather than sit alongside one another, a stronger connection between the player and the characters they inhabit – have survived. "We've made what we wanted to make," Hooker says.

And now the work is almost done – on this version of the world, at least. Nelson describes the external pressure surrounding the game as "unprecedented", but says the hardest part may be this final stretch, when the number of things the developers are permitted to change diminishes each day and the habit of constant intervention must give way to waiting. "It's ready," he says. "It ceases to become ours, and it becomes everybody's." For an hour and a half, he has steered confidently through Leonida, trusting that the world will hold together. Soon, millions of players will test that confidence, pushing its systems in directions their creators cannot entirely foresee. "Then," Nelson says, leaning forward to set down the PS5 controller, "there's a letting go."