Grand Theft Auto VI was already taking shape conceptually in 2015, with Rockstar later moving entire teams onto the project as development ramped up around 2020.
Rockstar Games head of development and Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson discussed the timeline in a new interview with French publication TroisCouleurs, providing one of the clearest accounts yet of how GTA VI evolved from early ideas into full-scale production.
According to Nelson, work begins long before hundreds or thousands of developers are actively building the finished game.
For GTA VI, that early process was underway in 2015.
Rockstar first had to decide where the next Grand Theft Auto should take place and what it wanted that location to represent.
Vice City and the wider fictional state of Leonida eventually emerged from that process, with development teams travelling to Florida to gather references and determine which aspects of the real region should influence Rockstar’s version of it.
That early phase involved deciding which locations, cultural details and distinctive areas were important enough to form the foundation of the new open world.
The project remained one of several major efforts inside Rockstar for years, particularly while Red Dead Redemption 2 was consuming significant resources across the company.
Nelson’s comments indicate that the balance shifted around 2020, when entire teams began moving onto GTA VI and development became a much larger company-wide effort.
That timeline closely matches a previous disclosure from Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive.
In May 2025, Take-Two said GTA VI had begun development “in earnest” in 2020 following the success of Red Dead Redemption 2.
The wording always suggested that work existed before 2020, but Rockstar had not previously provided such a clear starting point for the conceptual phase.
Nelson’s account now helps fill that gap.
Rather than GTA VI suddenly beginning in 2020, the picture is of a project that spent years going through planning, location research and early creative development before expanding into the enormous production effort Rockstar has today.
The distinction is important when discussing GTA VI’s unusually long development history.
By the time the game launches in November 2026, more than 11 years will have passed since the conceptual process Nelson described began.
That does not mean GTA VI has been in full production with its current-sized development team since 2015.
Rockstar was simultaneously finishing Red Dead Redemption 2, supporting GTA Online and working across multiple studios during much of that period.
The scale of GTA VI development increased dramatically later.
Recent interviews have shown just how much Rockstar itself has grown alongside the project.
Nelson has said the company is now more than twice the size it was around Red Dead Redemption 2, with specialists spread across numerous studios working on individual parts of GTA VI’s world.
Rockstar’s Los Angeles team, for example, has been heavily involved in creating and improving the game’s pedestrians and wider population systems.
The studio has also conducted extensive real-world research for Leonida, including work with professional drivers, artists and other specialists to recreate details of Florida culture inside the game.
That helps explain why a project first discussed internally more than a decade ago continued expanding long after its basic setting had been decided.
Rockstar officially acknowledged GTA VI was in active development in 2022 before releasing its first trailer in December 2023.
The company has since provided a much deeper look at the game through its 2026 Extended Look and a series of interviews conducted at Rockstar North.
GTA VI is scheduled to launch on November 19, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Nelson’s latest comments now give that release a clearer development timeline: the ideas behind GTA VI began forming in 2015, while the project became the large-scale, company-wide production players recognize today around 2020.
