The biggest game in the world … Grand Theft Auto VI.
Photograph: Rockstar Games How years of research built Grand Theft Auto VI’s obsessively detailed world The developers behind its virtual Florida share how they built their most ambitious world so far Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox?
Sign up here In 2015, a group of Grand Theft Auto developers from Rockstar North took their first trips to Miami to do field research for the next game in the phenomenally popular crime series.
“Before you’re doing hyper-organised research trips, you’re immersing yourself in the place and its history, the vibe of it,” Rob Nelson, one of the lead developers on GTA VI, tells me.
“[You see] the physical places you want to move characters through, the experiences you want them to have, and the juxtaposition between the extremes of society that are in Miami.” I wondered: did people ever recognise them on any of their research trips?
Did locals know what they were doing?
This is the biggest game in the world, after all; I imagine it would be difficult to go entirely undercover.
“We’re always semi-undercover,” he says.
“But if you have a bunch of dorks going through a terrifying neighbourhood, you do stick out a bit.” Grand Theft Auto VI is finally out next week, more than 10 years since those first exploratory trips.
A few weeks ago, I spent the day at Rockstar North’s headquarters in Edinburgh, watching as Nelson and fellow senior exec Jennifer Kolbe took me through Vice City, the fictional version of Miami that has emerged from all that work.
The setting always comes first for Rockstar games: the developers immerse themselves in the real-life version of the place they want to create, before they ask what they want to do within it and what they want to offer players.
From there emerge the story that Rockstar’s writers want to tell and the characters players will later meet.
This time that story is about a criminal couple on the run named Jason and Lucia.
Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) conjure fascinatingly detailed versions of the US: one a microcosm of California, the other of the old west.
GTA VI takes us to Leonida, virtual Florida, and as with Rockstar’s previous games it is gratuitously, absurdly detailed, from the macro level to the micro; from architecture and geography down to the smallest of details – such as the clothes that the pedestrians are wearing, the street art, the flyers on cafe walls and the insides of fridges.
As Nelson and I freely explored Vice City, we discussed the effort and motivations that went into the making of this ultra-maximalist game.
