It still comes as a surprise for many to learn that Grand Theft Auto, the brazenly American crime series that has been one of the world’s most popular and most controversial video games for the past 20 years, is mainly made in Scotland. But if you grow up in Edinburgh, developer Rockstar North is part of the background mythology of the place. Plenty of people passed through this studio at some point or another in the 2000s, as game testers or employees. As a student in Edinburgh at that time, I would hear rumours of wild parties at the executives’ houses, as decadent as those in the game. At a bar or a birthday or a housewarming, you might meet a guy who claimed to have come up with one of the puerile puns that grace the in-game businesses (eg Nutsaki, a Japanese restaurant, or the fried-chicken chain Cluckin’ Bell). Grand Theft Auto is now made by a huge team of nearly 5,000 people around the world but its central nervous system is still in Holyrood, in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat.
The setting of the latest Grand Theft Auto game really could not be further from the Scottish capital. Grand Theft Auto VI takes us to Vice City in the state of Leonida, a parody of Miami, Florida. It is a neon-soaked metropolis of sleaze and struggle, hard-partying excess juxtaposed with a barely concealed criminal underworld and unpredictable Florida madness.
One month before release, it is quiet at Rockstar’s headquarters. A lot of people have finished their labour on the game and are taking time off in the run-up to launch – a well-deserved rest after more than 10 years of development. Those who remain here are caught in the strange no man’s land between finishing a piece of art and releasing it into the world. When it does come out, GTA VI is expected to be the most profitable piece of entertainment ever made, projected to shift tens of millions of copies and earn billions in its first year; its predecessor, 2013’s GTA V, sold 230m copies. In the midst of a horrible time for the games business, full of studio closures layoffs and soaring development costs, a whole industry is relying on GTA VI to give it a shot in the arm. On one near-deserted floor, a screen shows a countdown to the release date.
For many players, meanwhile, the 13-year wait for a new Grand Theft Auto has become unbearable. When footage of GTA VI made its glitzy premiere on Netflix, it almost took the streaming giant’s servers down. Its first trailer has been viewed 300m times on YouTube alone. Across the world, people have booked days off work on 19 November to experience this event together – one of those increasingly rare shared global cultural moments in an age when we all live in our own algorithmic content bubbles.
There is a slightly strained atmosphere at Rockstar North, and not just because of the pressure of GTA VI’s impending release. Over in Glasgow, Rockstar is also defending a high-profile employment tribunal case over the dismissal of 34 of its employees last year, who claim they were fired because they were involved in union organisation efforts. The case was due to wind up in October, but will now drag on right up to Grand Theft Auto VI’s release. A few days before my visit, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe was testifying in court as former employees and their reps at the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) protested outside.
Today, Kolbe is sitting in front of me with Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North and one of the three creative leads on GTA VI, showing me what the studio has spent more than a decade and, by independent estimates that Rockstar will not confirm, more than $1bn making. On screen, Jason and Lucia – two young criminals on the run – are on their way from a bar to a nightclub, walking through downtown Vice City as the last vestiges of sunlight disappear and the streets become bathed in fluorescence. He is tall, square-shouldered, in a T-shirt and shorts; she has her hair up in a ponytail, wearing one of those merciless long-sleeved crop tops that almost nobody can pull off.
After dancing with each other at the club, part of a crowded mass of virtual people gyrating in neon UV-reactive mesh tops, they will each don a cap, sunglasses and a bandana over the face, and hold up a jewellery store before escaping into the night in a beaten-up car, the boot stuffed with holdalls filled with cash and sizeable firearms, evading the cops by driving right through a cornfield in an apt echo of Bonnie and Clyde.
Lucia is the first woman to have headline billing in a GTA game, part of a long lineage of criminal protagonists who range from the straightforwardly psychopathic (GTA V’s Trevor) to the unexpectedly sympathetic (GTA IV’s Niko Bellic, and San Andreas’s CJ). GTA VI is both her story and Jason’s. For some acts of this game you are locked into one character’s perspective, but most of the time you can switch freely between them. When they are apart, you can ensure they text and call each other. When they’re together, you can take them on little dates: to the gym, out to a bar, to a meditation retreat or to a liquor-store stick-up. You as the player become the steward of their relationship, and if you neglect it then there will be consequences. “You’re dropped into their lives,” Nelson explains, as Lucia speeds along a highway, Jason leaning out of the window to shoot at the tyres of the cop car pursuing them. “The relationship is yours to nurture or yours to lose. Whether it remains a romantic relationship is in your hands.”
This dynamic is not merely interesting – it is transformational for Grand Theft Auto. The series made its name on black humour and directionless violent mayhem, setting players free in virtual pastiches of New York, Miami or Los Angeles to crash stolen cars and terrorise pedestrians. GTA V in particular was an extravagant equal-opportunity offender, taking aim at everyone and everything from the US government to narcissistic tech bros, spoilt LA brats to hillbillies, the ultra-rich to caravan-dwelling wasters. Nobody has ever cared about anybody very much in a GTA game. Here, though, we are being asked not just to care about these characters, but to act out how they care for each other. When they are together, you can press a button to make them hold hands.
It is faintly unbelievable to see this game in action after it has existed for so long only as fervent rumour. GTA VI has been in development in some form since 2015, when the team took their first research trips to Miami (at this time, the game’s codename was Project Americas, reflecting a later abandoned ambition to set it across two continents). But it was only announced in December 2023, and has been delayed twice since. I get the impression that the people at Rockstar have basically been forced to put their metaphorical paintbrushes down. “They would never stop working on this game if they had the choice,” Kolbe says, somewhat ruefully. “It’s really hard to close it down,” Nelson admits. “If you step away and get a little bit of space from it, you can look at it objectively and go: ‘I’m proud of what we’ve done’. But ultimately, it is being taken away from you, and you do the best you can to finish it in the time that you’re told.”
Usually when shown a video game ahead of release, one is taken through a highly choreographed slice of the action designed to show it at its best, but that’s not what’s happening here. We’re simply tooling about in a densely populated Vice City, and almost anything I suggest, we can do. Walking out from Jason and Lucia’s flamingo-wallpapered apartment into the Florida sunshine, the first thing we see is a woman walking a dog. I ask if we can pet it; Nelson presses a button and Jason says: “Is it cool if I pet your dog?” “Course, she loves to greet her public,” the woman replies, before Jason stoops to give the pup a fuss. You can overhear pedestrians’ conversations as you pass by, and interrupting them might result in a bemused “Have we met?” or a stream of invective. Later, I see a gull sitting on a post by the beach and ask, just to be annoying, what kind of bird it is. Jason pulls out a pair of binoculars, the gull is recorded in a wildlife logbook, and I am told with pride that there are 62 types of birds to spot.
Of course we also do some crime. This is still Grand Theft Auto. But those who enjoy playing these games as a chaotic violent sociopath are in for a surprise here, because you have to be more careful than ever before. Jason and Lucia can’t just steal any car or bust their way into a bank; at the start they can only hotwire low-end vehicles and pick basic locks, working their way up to the higher-value jobs later. “These guys are a younger couple with their backs against the wall,” Nelson says. “Narratively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to go out and cause as much carnage and make as much noise as they can.” Instead of whipping out an assault rifle in the middle of a crowded street and sending everyone scattering, you have to scope out your targets, whether it’s a gas station or an upscale mall boutique. You can disable security cameras or steal the footage, find back doors and safe codes so that you can get in without pulling a gun on anyone, and get out before witnesses arrive.
Fail to do these things and chaos ramps up quickly. After a couple of small-time crime sprees, we take Jason and Lucia to a well-protected jewellery store, where Lucia turns her pistol on the security guards for a few tense seconds before they surrender. Upstairs, though, where Jason is shoving money from the safe into a holdall, another guard decides to shoot rather than surrender. A desperate scramble ensues, in which Jason smacks the guy with the butt of a gun to knock him out while Lucia yells from the front of the store, and as they climb on to a stolen motorbike to make their getaway, the police arrive. The chase takes us halfway around the district, followed by cop cars and helicopters. When they eventually make it back to their car, Jason and Lucia stow the cash, change their clothes, and lie low in the outskirts of the city for a while to wait out the heat.
GTA VI is still very much a game about crime and criminals, but it strongly encourages you towards playing in-character and avoiding directionless rampages. In this way it is heavily inspired by Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), in which you play an outlaw in the old west who comes to regret his life of violence. For Nelson, one of the greatest challenges of GTA VI’s development has been figuring out how to encourage players to behave differently without restricting their freedom, which would be antithetical to Rockstar’s creative philosophy. Even with an unlimited budget, you can’t solve the central tension of the form: the balance between the story that developers are trying to tell, and the random whims of any given player.
“Crime is a fundamental part of GTA – at least, up until now, it has been. We’re trying to make sure we’re not punishing people for playing the game they are used to … [but] your actions will have some effect on how the game plays out.” I ask whether this is the first GTA game that tries to encourage a measure of empathy. “I would say so,” Nelson replies. “I would say that it’s a product of the story we’re trying to tell. We’ve tried for the first time in a GTA to provide mechanisms that encourage it, for those who want to.”
Grand Theft Auto has forever been a lightning rod for moral panic over video game violence. In GTA III, infamously, you could hire a sex worker and then run her over to steal your money back. In the 00s the discovery of an explicit sex minigame hidden in the code of GTA San Andreas prompted class action lawsuits in the US. Haitian-American groups attempted to halt the sale of 2002’s GTA Vice City, VI’s spiritual predecessor, over its depictions of violence against those groups. US courts have consistently upheld Rockstar’s first amendment rights, but this history hints at a cultural double standard. It is widely accepted that film and TV can depict violence without endorsing it – few would seriously venture that Breaking Bad endorses cooking meth – but when it comes to video games, where the player takes an active role, they are often seen to be lionising the behaviour they depict.
As video game graphics have got more realistic – it is hard to see, in retrospect, how the now comically low-resolution puppet characters of 00s GTA games provoked such outrage – Grand Theft Auto has sought to contextualise its violence. Its cinematic storytelling and character development ambitions have grown exponentially, as have its budget and team size, which has quadrupled since GTA V. The entire history of games is a story of talented technical and creative people finding ways to work around technological constraints and make things that were never possible before, working magic with blocky characters and limited graphical power. But now the limitations that defined the scope of previous GTA games are essentially gone. The leash is off.
“What we have grappled with is the transition from being limited by technical constraints to being limited by human resource constraints,” Nelson says. “Like, how much can we physically build? You can keep going for ever … People say you can throw money at the problem, and you can to an extent, but it’s no guarantee of making something good.”
It’s true that with all that time, effort and money, Rockstar has been able to achieve a level of detail in GTA VI that is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in a game – even beyond Red Dead Redemption 2, which was so extravagantly, naturalistically detailed that someone went to the trouble of modelling horse testicles that retract in cold weather. In a GTA VI gas station, Nelson takes evident pleasure in showing me detailed eating and drinking animations as Jason wanders around with a doughnut in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other – the liquid inside the bottles sloshes realistically as he walks, and the racks are stocked with fully illustrated magazines that you can take off the shelf and read through. Every one of the pedestrians you see outside has been designed by someone, even down to their clothes.
Why go to this trouble? In the PlayStation 2 era, Rockstar was releasing a new GTA game every couple of years; they weren’t radically different from one another in terms of gameplay, but their shifting settings and characters allowed the series’ makers to stretch their creative muscles. By contrast, it’s now been 13 years and two console generations since the last GTA. Why spend all this time on a single, ostentatiously gigantic project? It comes down to this, Nelson says: if you were a developer with these resources, the only developer with these resources, wouldn’t you go for the most ambitious thing you could?
“They could have made GTA 5.5, and done it faster,” says Kolbe. “Ultimately, that’s not what they wanted.”
Nelson nods: “You have to take big swings. It can’t be just more of the same.”
Grand Theft Auto VI is released for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 19 November.
