Trailer and budget report
Rockstar released the Grand Theft Auto VI launch trailer on October 15, five weeks before the November 19 release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. On the same day, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published a long report on how the game was made, with Rockstar’s leadership on the record about the delays, the headcount and the budget rumours.
The trailer
The launch trailer debuts “Flower in a Hurricane” by Justice featuring Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Rockstar says the French duo composed the game’s original score, and the single will be on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album. VGC notes Rockstar says the footage was captured entirely on a PlayStation 5, without saying whether that was a base PS5 or a PS5 Pro.
The trailer’s description repeats the setup: Jason and Lucia “have always known the deck is stacked against them,” and an easy score gone wrong drops them into “a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida.”
What Bloomberg’s report adds
As summarised by Polygon, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe didn’t give a budget but “did shoot down a popular rumor that it surpassed the $1.5 billion it cost to build Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.” Schreier still calls it the most expensive game ever made, based on headcount and years in development.
The report confirms an early codename, Project Americas, from when the game was meant to span large parts of North and South America. The scope was later narrowed to Miami and its surroundings.
Rockstar’s official Grand Theft Auto VI artwork collage. Image: Rockstar Games.
Full production only started after Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018, because that game pulled in most of the studio. Development lead Rob Nelson called one phase “a dark period”. Making Jason and Lucia work as a couple meant building far more NPC behaviour than planned, and Nelson said “the projections they were giving us were horrifying.” Head of development Phil Hooker said that when “some areas weren’t going to make it,” Rockstar moved the date: “We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.”
And the next game
Hooker and art director Aaron Garbut also told Bloomberg there won’t be another eight-year gap, VGC reports. “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” Hooker said. Garbut: “We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project. But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”
So the trailer handles the marketing and the report handles the record. It’s the most Rockstar has said about how GTA 6 was made, five weeks before people can play it.
