GTA 6 started with a trip to Florida, says Rob Nelson
Rockstar did not start GTA 6 with a plot. Rob Nelson told TroisCouleurs the work began with a trip to Florida, a pile of photographs and a blocked-out map, and that the first version of the story ran to a page and a half.
GTA6 LIFE
Rob Nelson, head of development at Rockstar Games, told TroisCouleurs in an interview published on August 27, 2026 that GTA 6 began with the choice of a place: the team flew to Florida, drove around, took pictures, then picked the areas to include, the Everglades and towns outside Miami. Characters came afterwards, chosen to carry the player through those places. Nelson dates the start of development to 2015.
GTA 6 began with a trip to Florida, before a single character existed and before a single mission was designed. Rob Nelson, head of development at Rockstar Games, laid out the sequence to TroisCouleurs, the French magazine that was given access to Rockstar North in Edinburgh in July 2026. The interview ran on August 27, 2026, the day of the Extended Look, and TroisCouleurs published it in English as well as French.
Certainly though, the first thing we always do, once we decide where we want to set the game, is we’ll go there. And just feel it, and go out and just drive around.
The first trip is a small one. “Almost always on our own at very first, just a handful of people, and we’ll take a ton of pictures, and soak as much of it up as we can,” Nelson says. A second trip follows, with a larger group and local consultants.
Then come the areas. “We want to include the Everglades, and we want to include some of these towns outside of Miami,” Nelson says. The team blocks out the map roughly where those places sit in the real world, picks the features it wants to accentuate, and ends up with “a warped sort of version of reality.” The game’s own wetlands are called Grassrivers, one of the six regions Rockstar has named on the Vice City map.
Characters come after the setting, and they are written to serve it. The writers look for “the best character set to take us through the widest range of places”: who can take the player into the Everglades, who is believable in a drug deal in a tower block being raided by cops, who belongs in a high-end nightclub. “They are like your tour guides or companions through this world.”
Rupert Humphries, Rockstar’s senior vice president of narrative, then “delivers a page and a half of the story.” From there the studio builds out the tentpole missions first. “This one is going to be the catalyst that is going to move them from this part of the game to that part of the game,” Nelson says. The game is set over chapters.
The last layer is the player who refuses the route. “What if the player does something different, can we allow for it, if the player wants to go off the rails?” Nelson describes the work as “always sort of building it up in layers, and seeing what’s working and what is not.”
The interview also dates the project. “The game’s been in development since 2015,” Nelson says, and “the majority of the team really started rolling on to it after Red Dead Redemption 2 released in 2018.” That start point sits eleven years before release day.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Development starts, per Rob Nelson | 2015 |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 ships | October 26, 2018 |
| Rockstar calls development “well underway” | February 4, 2022 |
| Announcement and first trailer | December 4, 2023 |
| GTA 6 release | November 19, 2026 |
Nelson does not say how many chapters the game has, or which missions are the tentpoles, and Rockstar has published neither list. The journalists and creators hosted at the studio in July 2026 never held a controller either.
