IIn 2015, a group of Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto developers made their first trip to Miami to do field research for the next game in the incredibly popular detective series. “Before you go on hyper-organized research trips, you immerse yourself in the place, its history, its atmosphere,” Rob Nelson, one of the lead developers of GTA VI, told me. “(You see) the physical locations you want to move the characters into, the experiences you want them to have, and the juxtaposition between the extremes of society that are in Miami.”
I wondered: have people ever recognized them from one of their research trips? Did the residents know what they were doing? After all, it’s the greatest game in the world; I imagine it would be difficult to go there entirely secret. “We’re still half-infiltrated,” he said. “But if you have a bunch of idiots running through a scary neighborhood, you stand out a little bit.”
Grand Theft Auto VI will finally be released next week, more than 10 years after those first exploratory journeys. A few weeks ago, I spent the day at Rockstar North headquarters in Edinburgh, watching Nelson and his colleague Jennifer Kolbe show me around Vice City, the fictional version of Miami that emerged from all this work. Setting always comes first for Rockstar games: developers delve into the real-life version of the place they want to create, before asking themselves what they want to do there and what they want to offer players. From there is born the story that the Rockstar writers want to tell and the characters that players will meet later. This time the story is about a criminal couple on the run named Jason and Lucia.
Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) evoke fascinating and detailed versions of the United States: 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’s gratuitously and absurdly detailed, from the macro to the micro level; from architecture and geography down to the smallest details – like the clothes pedestrians wear, the street art, the leaflets on the walls of cafes and the inside of refrigerators. As Nelson and I freely explored Vice City, we discussed the effort and motivations that went into creating this ultra-maximalist game. You can read more about it in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine later this week.
Grand Theft Auto VI was made by a huge team of nearly 5,000 people, but there are a relatively small number of decision-makers at the top, most of whom have been at Rockstar for a very long time. (Lead writer Rupert Humphries, for example, has been with the company since 2008.) They each take responsibility for the elements of the game that suit them best and are most important to them. “The game is so big that no one could get enough of it in their head,” Nelson told me. His area of expertise is design, storytelling, and animation, with a bit of casting on the side: Nelson’s background is in character art and animation, and his attention to detail is quite evident in his demonstration of the game. He takes immense pleasure in showing me small details, like the way Jason eats a hot dog or how, while walking through a gas station, he can take bites of a donut with one hand while sipping a beer from the other.
When Jason starts running, he slides the six-pack of beer he’s carrying into the crook of his arm, the liquid inside the bottles sloshing around. At one point during my run in Vice City, Nelson is briefly upset during a jewelry store heist when the foot placement of one of the security guards doesn’t seem right. The level of detail in this game is simply out of reach for any other game developer thanks to Rockstar’s abundance of money and time and the patience of its parent company, Take-Two Interactive.
Rockstar’s worlds are believable because, despite their general excess, they are grounded in the real-life locations they are based on and the real-life experiences the developers had in those places. Jennifer Kolbe says that when researching Grand Theft Auto IV, which was set in the New York-inspired city of Liberty City, “people who had lived in New York their whole lives were going to places they would never go.” ... We then give that experience to the players.
Nelson remembers staying out at a Miami nightclub until 4 a.m., then getting up a few hours later to wander around a racetrack with a memorable hangover. They went on cop rides in South Beach and hung out at weird bars in the Florida Keys. “Some of our team members, especially the artists, are very fearless,” he says. “They’ll walk around all kinds of places with their cameras. They’re not afraid.”
Rockstar is famous for its depictions of the United States, particularly American cities. But I always wondered what this team could do in a different context. Could Rockstar one day imagine a GTA taking place outside of America? “You should never say never, but there is still so much to do in America,” Nelson said. I ask whether Rockstar’s outsider status, as a group of developers based primarily outside the United States (although it has offices in New York and San Diego), gives it a unique view of a country so vast and full of contradictions. “I think we’re all strangers to this version of America,” he says. “No matter where you live…no one experiences the America we describe here in all its fullness.”
What to play
One of the few games brave enough to step out into the dead zone surrounding GTA VI is Tanuki: The Summer of Pona whimsical game about a chubby raccoon trying to rebuild the sanctuary he calls home. I played an earlier version on the Tokyo game show a few years ago and was pleased to find that it came out with flying colors. “Arriving alongside November’s blue wave, Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is a leisurely dining game that feels perfectly suited to the present moment,” as writer Christian Donlan says in a review published this week. “Assigned to repair an ancient shrine in the weeks leading up to a local festival, you’ll find yourself cleaning up trash, repairing broken arches, and slowly bringing a small rural community together.”
Available on: Xbox (on Game Pass), Switch, PC
Estimated reading time:
six o’clock
after newsletter promotion
What to read
The brilliant cooperative independent darling Great walk found itself mired in AI controversy after the Independent Games Festival Awards released a statement on its stance regarding the use of large language models in nominated games. In what appears to be an abundance of caution, the developers of Big Walk’s House House revealed to IGF jurors that they had used an LLM to help solve a coding problem during the game’s development. The fallout has illustrated how vocal anti-AI sentiment is among video game creators and raised difficult questions about where the line should be drawn.
Nintendo hires a historian/librarian to help preserve and document the creation of its games and hardware.
A documentary film about the legendary developer’s final years BioWare arrives, from the Canadian channel Super Channel. The studio was shut down by EA last month after 30 years of creating some of the most influential RPGs ever made.
What to click on
Block of questions
Feel free to send us your questions and comments about GTA VI – next week’s issue will be a big Q&A session on the game. In the meantime, reader Tim request :
“I really worry about spoilers, to the point where I’m thinking of writing a prank contract for my son to sign to promise not to spoil it (teenagers today seem to just explode in story mode, while I enjoy savoring it). In a world where South Park contained Red Dead Redemption 2 spoilers, how the hell can we avoid them? Any advice??
Honestly, you might be fighting a losing battle unless you a) stay off the internet completely and b) don’t talk to anyone in person who could possibly play it. GTA VI is a huge game that is rightly expected to take weeks or months to complete, but we all know that a thousand content creators will have somehow gotten through the whole thing and put all the footage on YouTube within days of release.
The great thing about Rockstar games, though, is that outside of the story, you actually create your own experience, choosing what to do and how to spend your time, how your Jason and Lucia act. And no one can ruin that for you.
If you have a question for the question block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – click Reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.
Gn tech
