Two new GTA 6 screenshots ship with Bloomberg's Businessweek making-of story
Rockstar provided two new official GTA 6 screenshots on October 14, 2026, published alongside Bloomberg Businessweek's November cover story on how the game was made — 36 days before the November 19 launch (RockstarINTEL). One image shows Jason and Lucia covered in mud and drinking a beer in Leonida's off-road racing area; the other a rear close-up of a car on Ocean Drive at sunset. The same Bloomb
Two new screenshots, 36 days out
Rockstar provided two new official Grand Theft Auto VI screenshots to Bloomberg Businessweek, published on October 14, 2026 alongside the magazine's November cover story, "Inside the Making of Grand Theft Auto VI," by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. RockstarINTEL, which spotted the pair, describes the first image as Jason and Lucia in Leonida's off-road and dirt-racing area, both covered in mud and drinking a beer. The launch of GTA 6 is set for November 19, 2026, which puts the drop exactly 36 days before release.
Why the mud and the beer matter
The beer in that frame is not a decorative detail. In the Bloomberg feature, Rob Nelson and the other senior leads describe arguing over whether GTA VI's detail level makes a bottle appearing out of thin air feel wrong, and whether the player should have to walk to a store refrigerator, carry the beer to the counter and pay for it before drinking (Bloomberg). The screenshot shows the philosophy that came out of that debate: two characters who have just finished a race in the dirt, drinks in hand.
That is also the first time a Rockstar leadership team has talked publicly about the reasoning behind GTA VI's density, rather than its features. Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, frames the studio's answer bluntly: "And now you understand why it took so long," she says of the layers of NPC, lighting and audio work that go into a single in-game club (Bloomberg).
The Ocean Drive car is a reading, not an announcement
The second screenshot is a rear close-up of a car on Ocean Drive at sunset, with neon signs lit and a police helicopter flying low (RockstarINTEL). RockstarINTEL reads the vehicle as a new Pegassi Zorrusso "with a different manufacturer badge and name," based on its lettering. That is an inference from the image, not a Rockstar statement, and it is worth treating as such until the car appears in a trailer or in the game.
The Pegassi Zorrusso itself is not new. It was added to GTA Online on October 24, 2019 with the Diamond Casino & Resort update, sells for $1,925,000 at Legendary Motorsport and is modelled on the 2018 Italdesign Zerouno (GTA Wiki). It also already appears in GTA VI: the car carries Jason and Lucia through Vice City in the first trailer. If RockstarINTEL's reading is right, the interest is not a new model but a familiar one wearing a new badge — a habit Rockstar has kept for two decades.
The real payload behind the screenshots: Rockstar's own numbers
The screenshots are the visible part of a story that is mostly about company scale. Bloomberg reports that Rockstar employed 2,441 people when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in October 2018; it now has 4,711 staff across 12 offices, a rise of 2,270 people, or roughly 93%, in eight years. Kolbe says the studio remains committed to not repeating Red Dead 2's crunch, offering paid time off in exchange for extra hours, while acknowledging that the record is imperfect.
The same feature traces the game's start: in 2015, Nelson and other senior staff flew to Miami for their first research trip, and the project was code-named "Project Americas" because it was meant to span large parts of North and South America before being cut back to Miami and its surroundings (Bloomberg). After Red Dead Redemption 2, several senior people left, including co-founder and longtime lead writer Dan Houser; Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut all received the title of head of development, an unusually shared structure for a project of this size.
4,711 employees, or 5,900 developers?
Two numbers are now circulating, and they do not measure the same thing. Bloomberg's 4,711 is a company-wide staffing figure across 12 offices. The 5,900-plus figure reported in September 2026 came from a count of employee profiles relayed by GameGPU, and credits people by studio, including contractors and support roles. Neither is a credits list, and Rockstar has never published a project headcount, so the only definitive count will arrive after November 19.
Two stills inside a 563-image library
Individually, two screenshots are a small addition. GTA Intel, which catalogues official images, lists 563 GTA VI screenshots in its gallery, including the 12 Game Informer exclusives released with issue 382 on September 29, 2026. Rockstar has been releasing stills in steady batches since the Extended Look, so the screenshots are no longer the story by themselves — what changed on October 14 is the interview they came attached to.
What is still unconfirmed
Bloomberg notes that the developers are not yet talking about the planned online component of GTA VI, and analysts' expectations of 40 million copies on PlayStation and Xbox and more than $3 billion in revenue in four months remain projections, not figures Rockstar has confirmed. Kolbe also pushed back on the widely repeated claim that the game cost more than $1.5 billion to make. The only forward-looking statement from the studio is Hooker's: the tools and team built for GTA VI mean the next Rockstar release "won't take another eight years."
The making-of in detail: a "dark period," two delays and a leak
Rockstar gave Bloomberg's Jason Schreier a full day inside Rockstar North in Edinburgh, the studio's headquarters in the former offices of The Scotsman newspaper, with several senior leads speaking on the record (Rockstar Actu). It is the first time the company has discussed the difficulties of an eight-year development in that much detail. The project began in 2015 with a research trip to Miami and the code name "Project Americas," meant to cover large parts of North and South America before being cut back to Vice City and its surroundings.
Work then stalled while most of the studio finished Red Dead Redemption 2 for its 2018 release. Several historic figures left afterwards, including co-founder and lead writer Dan Houser, and project leadership passed to three people — Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut — an arrangement Nelson acknowledges some staff found frustrating. By late 2019 the script outline centred on Jason and Lucia, but the pandemic, a wave of hiring and departing designers turned the next stretch into what Nelson calls a "dark period."
Garbut describes the September 2022 leak, when unfinished gameplay videos appeared online, as "like someone going through your dirty laundry." The first trailer, published December 4, 2023, drew 93 million views in 24 hours — a record for a non-music video on YouTube, per Rockstar Actu. Rockstar had then called a 2025 release realistic; the date slipped to May 26, 2026, then to November 19, 2026, as the workload of writing and animating the game's NPCs outgrew the plan.
The studio also changed how it works. Jennifer Kolbe says Rockstar promised staff it would not finish the game on crunch, and now trades paid time off or extra pay for extra hours, while conceding the record "isn't perfect." Since 2024 everyone works five days a week in the office and GTA 6 developers have no outside access to studio servers, a change Rockstar attributes to security after the 2022 hack (Rockstar Actu). Separately, the feature revisits the dismissal of 34 employees, most of them involved in a unionisation effort: Rockstar says they were fired for sharing confidential material on a Discord server, which the group denies, and a Glasgow employment tribunal is expected to rule by the end of October.
