GTA 6 Development Secrets: Narrower Roads, the Weapon Wheel and Why No One at Rockstar Knows the Whole Game
A new Bloomberg video from Jason Schreier, filmed at Rockstar North's Edinburgh studio, reveals that GTA VI's map took over 11 years to build, that narrower roads forced the team to add far more buildings, and that art director Aaron Garbut says no single person at Rockstar has the entire game memorized.
On October 19, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published a new video built from material that didn't make it into his earlier written reporting on Grand Theft Auto VI — filmed during a visit to Rockstar North's Edinburgh studio. The video includes on-camera comments from Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut, and it paints the clearest picture yet of how a game this large actually gets built: a map that took over a decade to lay out, road decisions that quietly reshaped entire neighborhoods, and a team that, by its own admission, doesn't fully know everything that's in its own game.
With GTA VI about a month from its November 19 release at the time of the video, here's what Schreier and Garbut revealed about how Rockstar North actually built Leonida.
1. The Map Came First, and It Took Over a Decade
According to Schreier, a handful of Rockstar North artists have been working on GTA VI for more than 11 years, with some of the earliest work reaching back to around 2015. That lines up with how Rockstar builds its open-world games generally: the map comes first, long before missions, vehicles, or systems are locked down, because everything else in the game ends up depending on where streets, water, and buildings sit.
That kind of timeline is easy to state and hard to picture. Eleven years is longer than the gap between Grand Theft Auto V's announcement and GTA VI's own reveal trailer — and it was spent almost entirely on groundwork most players will never consciously notice.
2. Narrower Roads, Bigger Consequences
One specific detail Garbut raised is that Leonida's roads are narrower than the ones in Grand Theft Auto V's Los Santos. That sounds like a minor stylistic choice, but Garbut described it as having a "ripple effect" across the rest of the map: narrower streets meant less empty space between buildings, which meant the team had to design and place more structures to fill in city blocks that would otherwise look sparse. In his words, decisions like that "sort of come back to bite you later."
It's a useful reminder that world design in a game this size isn't just about drawing a city and populating it. A single measurement — the width of a street — can cascade into thousands of hours of additional art and layout work elsewhere on the map.
3. Nobody at Rockstar Has the Whole Game Memorized
Garbut's central point in the video is blunt: there is no one person at Rockstar North who holds the entirety of GTA VI in their head. The game is too large, and too granular, for any single developer — including its art director — to track every detail that's been added across more than a decade of production by hundreds of people.
That's a notable admission from a studio known for obsessive attention to detail, and it reframes how a project like this actually comes together: not as one unified vision executed top-down, but as thousands of smaller decisions made independently by artists and designers working on their own corners of the map.
4. The Freedom to Add Small, Unplanned Details
Schreier connected Garbut's comments to a detail he'd previously reported from Red Dead Redemption 2: a developer noticed that horses' testicles visibly reacted to cold weather, a feature that was never on any official design document and was added by one artist who had the latitude to chase a small, strange idea. Schreier's point is that Rockstar's internal culture still works this way on GTA VI — individual developers are given enough freedom to notice something that would make the world feel more alive and simply build it, without that detail ever being planned centrally.
It's the kind of studio culture that explains why Rockstar's worlds tend to reward close attention: much of what players eventually discover and share clips of wasn't commissioned from the top. It came from someone on the team deciding, on their own, that it was worth doing.
5. Why the Weapon Wheel Looks So Familiar
Reporting from the same video indicates Rockstar spent a significant amount of time prototyping alternatives to the classic radial weapon-select wheel the series has used since Grand Theft Auto IV. After testing other approaches, the studio ultimately returned to the familiar wheel for the final game. It's a small example of the same underlying pattern described above: a team with the freedom to experiment, and the discipline to walk back an idea that didn't actually improve on what already worked.
6. Why This Kind of Detail Has Defined Rockstar's Reputation
None of this is new to how Rockstar works — it's part of why the studio's open-world games have built such a dedicated following for density and texture rather than just scale. Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 both became famous less for any single headline feature and more for the sheer number of small, discoverable details scattered across their maps: specific NPC routines, environmental reactions, and sight gags that most players stumble onto rather than seek out. Garbut's comments suggest that same bottom-up process, rather than a master list handed down from above, is what's producing Leonida.
It also explains why Rockstar has historically been cautious about overpromising specific features ahead of launch. If no one on the team can give a complete inventory of what's in the game, it's genuinely difficult for the studio to confirm every mechanic or detail in marketing material before release — some of what ships may not be fully documented internally until testers and, eventually, players find it.
7. How This Fits the Road to November 19
This kind of developer-insight reporting is different from Rockstar's own newswire drip of trailers, radio reveals, and edition details — it's independent journalism built on direct access to the studio, and it's one of the only windows players get into how a project this size is actually produced. With GTA VI now about a month from launch, it also puts the scale of the project in perspective: everything confirmed so far, from Leonida's regions to the weapons and combat systems shown in the trailers, is the visible result of the kind of decade-plus groundwork Garbut described.
It's also a useful companion to Rockstar's own breakdown of the October 15 launch trailer, which showed the finished product this development process has been building toward.
Quick Recap
- Rockstar North artists have reportedly worked on GTA VI's map for 11+ years, since around 2015.
- Leonida's roads are narrower than Los Santos's in GTA V, which forced the team to add more buildings to fill city blocks.
- Art director Aaron Garbut says no single person at Rockstar has the entire game memorized.
- Developers have freedom to add small, unplanned details, similar to Red Dead Redemption 2's cold-weather horse detail.
- Rockstar reportedly tested alternatives to the classic weapon wheel before returning to it for launch.
For more on what's officially confirmed ahead of release, visit the full GTA 6 guide archive on walkthroughs.net.