Rob Nelson, Co-Studio Head for Rockstar North, has revealed during an interview with TroisCouleurs that Grand Theft Auto VI wasn’t “fully formed” at the time of its first trailer.
The original GTA VI trailer was accompanied by ‘Love Is A Long Road’ by Tom Petty and featured a look at Lucia and Jason (although he wasn’t named at the time), a 2025 release window that obviously didn’t happen, and confirmation of the Vice City setting. However, Nelson revealed that Rockstar doesn’t always have a firm image in its head of what a project is going to look like when starting a new game. “It may be an image, often it is a song we rally around,” he said.
Nelson added, “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,” adding that developers will “take a ton of pictures, and soak as much of it up as we can and see what speaks to us and start to talk about it and share ideas about what we want to incorporate.”
So, I’d love to say that it was an image from here that was in our heads, but you’re usually chasing something a little bit out of reach and then you see something, and choose a piece of music, and these two things start to work. The game starts to pull together these sorts of pieces.
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 and so when this team is able to do that – and it’s definitely made with everything that you’ve got, but it’s the best of everything you’ve got at that point – it’s put together in such a way that it helps be a bit of a guiding light of what it needs to feel like.
Grand Theft Auto VI recently received a huge info blowout thanks to Netflix’s ‘An Extended Look’ feature, which offered over 20 minutes of gameplay footage that included combat, driving, missions, and more. It was revealed soon after via press previews that GTA VI’s map is going to be double the size of its predecessor’s already-impressive open world, and Rockstar also revealed that it originally thought about including four protagonists in the game before settling on just two.
Rockstar Games will launch GTA VI for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, 2026.
[Source – TroisCouleurs via GamesRadar]