GTA 6 Was Meant to Span the Americas, Bloomberg Reports

Jason Schreier's Bloomberg piece says Rockstar first dreamed up a GTA 6 covering North and South America, then shrank it to Vice City.

Jason Schreier's Bloomberg report on Rockstar North says GTA 6 was first imagined as a gigantic open world called "Project Americas", later narrowed to Vice City and its surroundings. Rockstar also wanted to build it alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but had to shelve it.

Schreier visited the studio in Edinburgh and published his article on October 14. According to Notebookcheck, which summarises the piece, the original plan covered large parts of North and South America. Internally it was called "Project Americas".

GTA 6 and the map that might have been

Fan reconstructions of the map suggest a world bigger than GTA 5's but well below that first idea. That comes from press coverage, not an official figure.

The report does not clearly explain why the original vision was dropped. Notebookcheck suggests technical challenges and sheer scale may have played a part, but that is the outlet's own guess. By its summary, the report itself draws no direct link.

For what we do know about the setting, see our /mapa page.

A GTA 6 that could have landed in the early 2020s

IGN Latin America and IGN Pakistan pick up another detail from the same article. Rockstar considered developing GTA 6 at the same time as Red Dead Redemption 2, which would have meant a release in the early 2020s, years before the 2025 window the company announced publicly.

Red Dead 2's ambition got in the way. Rob Nelson, co-head of Rockstar North, had to put the whole team on that game, and GTA 6 went onto the back burner. Nelson told Bloomberg that what they built for Red Dead would pay off in GTA 6. IGN cites the evolution of NPC interaction as an example.

The report also debunks the idea that the game was in continuous production since 2013. Per IGN Latin America, there were research trips to Florida from 2014, but the story had no skeleton until late 2019. Then came the studio reorganisation, the pandemic, massive leaks and several delays.

Crunch, office rules and what comes next

The article describes a stretch of internal turbulence. Developers disagreed over how realistic the game should be. At times Rockstar lacked the production capacity to build its systems and populate the world with NPCs, which is why it opened a new division in Los Angeles.

Rockstar has introduced measures to curb overtime, but according to the summary crunch has not vanished entirely. Staff still work from the office five days a week, which the company justifies on security grounds. It plans to review the policy after launch, though management reportedly thinks a return to traditional hybrid work is unlikely.

Headcount doubled during development and internal processes changed. Rockstar hopes GTA 6 technology will speed up its next games, and says the next one will not take another eight years. It has not said what that game is.

What we still don't know

• The concrete reasons behind cutting Project Americas. The report does not give them.
• Whether anything from the scrapped map will return in future releases. Nothing is confirmed.
• What Rockstar's next project will be.
• What the surf and Ibiza books spotted in the studio photos mean. That is fan speculation, unconfirmed.

Meanwhile, you can revisit the leads in /personajes and keep up with the rest in the /blog. The game arrives on November 19, and for now the only scale that matters is the one of that map.