GTA 6 Began as Project Americas, Report Says

GTA 6 began internally as Project Americas, a proposal intended to include large areas of both North and South America. The project was eventually reduced to Miami and its surroundings as development progressed. The revelation comes from a wide-ranging Bloomberg interview with Rockstar, as reported by Eurogamer.

GTA 6's original plan

The first research trip mentioned in the report took place in 2015. Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson brought a group of employees to Miami to study the region. At that point, the project still carried the Project Americas codename and had a much larger geographical scale than the version that moved forward.

According to the reporting cited by Eurogamer, the intention was to represent large stretches of land across the two Americas. The source does not identify countries, cities, borders or the number of playable areas included in that concept. What is established is that the continental idea was later reduced to Miami and nearby areas.

The change shows that GTA 6 underwent a major scope review before reaching its current form. Rather than spreading development across large portions of two continents, Rockstar focused the project on a more clearly defined region. The report does not say exactly when that reduction was approved.

Red Dead Redemption 2 changed the schedule

The original idea was to develop Project Americas alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. However, the western grew in scope and ambition, causing GTA 6 to be pushed back internally by several years. The transformation therefore affected not only the planned map but also the point at which production could move ahead more substantially.

Rockstar itself changed significantly after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched. According to the figures in the report, the company grew from 2,441 to 4,711 employees across 12 offices, nearly doubling in size. Dan Houser left the company, while Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker moved into senior development roles.

By 2019, Rockstar had the skeleton of GTA 6 and its two-protagonist structure. Jason and Lucia would live out their shared crime fantasy, establishing the central hook that remained part of the project. Smaller details and the game's mechanical intricacies still required considerably more development time.

The Covid-19 pandemic created another obstacle by forcing teams to work from home. Nelson said keeping a team together through that period was genuinely challenging. The account connects this phase to the time needed for GTA 6's more specific details and systems, without identifying individual mechanics that were affected.

Changes to Rockstar's development culture

The interview also addressed criticism of the extreme working hours associated with Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe described that period as a moment when the company had to examine itself. She said the team decided not to repeat the same process, while acknowledging that the working experience had not been perfect for everyone.

Bloomberg reportedly spoke with dozens of Rockstar employees who expressed mostly positive views about the changes. Improvements mentioned included reduced crunch and the removal of managers considered abusive or difficult to work with. The company is also facing an employment tribunal in Scotland involving 34 dismissed employees, including 31 from Rockstar North, with the parties offering conflicting explanations for the firings.

The leak and further delays

Development suffered another setback in 2022, when a phishing attack gained access to Rockstar's Slack and led to unfinished material being leaked. Garbut compared the experience to somebody going through the developers' dirty laundry and getting inside their heads. He described it as invasive and emotionally difficult, without treating anything contained in the leak as official information about the game.

The first trailer, shown in 2023, initially promised a 2025 release. Rockstar later moved the launch to May 2026 to secure more development time, before determining that it could not meet that window either. Kolbe recalled having to call Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick to deliver the news of the additional delay.

According to Kolbe, Zelnick initially asked whether she was joking but understood the decision after hearing the reasons. She emphasized that the team was not ordered to release the game before it was ready. For players, the practical result is a current release date of November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, while a PC edition is only reported for the following first quarter.

What remains unknown

The report does not explain which specific regions would have appeared in Project Americas, how much of that concept entered production or whether discarded ideas could return in the future. It also leaves open exactly when Rockstar decided to restrict the geography to Miami and its surroundings. As summarized by Eurogamer, the key development is that today's GTA 6 grew from a much larger continental concept and was reshaped through years of delays, organizational changes and shifting production needs.