GTA 6: Aaron Garbut, co-head of Rockstar North since 2014

Aaron Garbut is co-studio head of Rockstar North, the Edinburgh studio developing Grand Theft Auto VI, alongside Rob Nelson. GamesIndustry.biz still named the pair as the studio’s two co-heads on August 28, 2026. Both were art directors at the studio when they took over its running in September 2014, after president Leslie Benzies went on sabbatical. The game launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

His earliest credited work at DMA Design, as the studio was then called, is Space Station Silicon Valley on the Nintendo 64. As an artist on the project, Garbut and lead programmer Leslie Benzies would often show the team other N64 games, Super Mario 64 among them, to work out what had to set theirs apart. After Grand Theft Auto 2 shipped in October 1999, both moved to the new satellite office in Leith, Edinburgh, which opened with 25 people. Rockstar Games publishes no biography of Garbut, and no tier 1 or tier 2 source gives the year he joined.

Art director from GTA III to GTA V

Other games of the time, Garbut felt, “were a thing you played.” He wanted Grand Theft Auto III to be “a place you lived in.”

Game	Release	What Garbut said or did
Grand Theft Auto III	October 23, 2001	A place to live in rather than a thing to play
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City	October 29, 2002	Used Miami Vice as his reference for the neon lighting
Grand Theft Auto IV	April 29, 2008	Picked New York as “an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city,” and estimated around 250,000 location photos
Grand Theft Auto V	September 17, 2013	Said the map could hold San Andreas, GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption combined

On GTA V he also recalled a trip to Bombay Beach with Dan Houser that led them to start Trevor’s story on the Salton Sea. Los Angeles was only a starting point, he said, and the team was not “dictated by reality” when building Los Santos.

What he has said about GTA 6

Speaking to The New York Times on August 27, 2026, Garbut described Leonida’s population this way: “We art-directed each individual one of them.” Then the rooms they live in, as GamesIndustry.biz reported the next day: “Every room in the game, somebody thought about this. Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table.” Rockstar gave the paper a figure of more than 600,000 animations the same day, against roughly 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2.

On September 29, 2026, in Game Informer’s GTA 6 issue, Garbut called Leonida the biggest map Rockstar has made “by some degree,” twice the size of GTA 5’s. He made no comparison with Red Dead Redemption 2: the “three times” figure that keeps circulating comes from a separate remark by Rob Nelson. What has changed, in Garbut’s words quoted by VGC, is the buildings: “This new world is different,” up “to the point we hit a critical mass with the numbers of our interiors, and you start to feel the buildings are more real inside and out.” The regions named so far are mapped in the Vice City map guide.