GTA 6 started with a trip to Florida, says Rob Nelson

GTA 6 began with a trip to Florida, before any character or mission existed. 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 in English and French on August 27, 2026.

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.

“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 as in the real world, accentuates some features, and ends up with “a warped sort of version of reality.” The game’s own wetlands are called Grassrivers, on the Vice City map.

Characters come after the setting, written to serve it. The writers look for “the best character set to take us through the widest range of places.” “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 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.” Per Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg feature of October 14, 2026 (via Eurogamer), that 2015 trip to Miami was for Project Americas, which “aimed to feature big swaths of land across both North and South America” before shrinking to Miami. Red Dead Redemption 2 pushed it back several years.

In an 18-minute video picked up by IGN France on October 20, 2026, Schreier places the hard years between 2019 and 2022: part of the team felt stuck, several designers left, and the game only took shape in early 2023. The driving problem, he says, was balancing Red Dead Redemption’s realism with GTA’s arcade feel.

Milestone	Date
First research trip to Miami	2015
Red Dead Redemption 2 ships	October 26, 2018
Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker become heads of development, per Gamekult	2020
Game takes shape, per Schreier	Early 2023
Announcement and first trailer	December 4, 2023
GTA 6 release	November 19, 2026

The first trailer went out before the game was finished, Nelson says.

With the first trailer for this game, the Tom Petty song [Love is a Long Road] was a real sort of mission statement. You don’t have the game fully formed, you have an idea of what it’s going to be, but you really have to push hard to pull that together.

That trailer promised 2025. For the second delay, Jennifer Kolbe of Rockstar phoned Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, Bloomberg reports: “I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.’”