GTA VI: Rockstar reveals development started in 2015 — and the full team only joined after RDR2
The 11-year answer
For years, the question of when GTA VI actually started has been answered with estimates and job listings. Rockstar has now given the clearest answer yet. In an interview with the French magazine Trois Couleurs, Rob Nelson, head of development at Rockstar and co-studio head of Rockstar North, revealed that the game has been in development since 2015 — "so the idea has been gestating for a very long time," as he put it (La Razón).
The clarification matters because it settles a timeline that had only been inferred. In May 2025, parent company Take-Two said GTA VI had begun development "in earnest" in 2020, after the success of Red Dead Redemption 2 (GameSpot). That wording always implied earlier work existed — but Rockstar had never given a precise starting point for the conceptual phase (Techtroduce). Nelson's account fills the gap: the project spent years in planning and location research before becoming the enormous production it is today.
Concept in 2015, full team in 2018
The key nuance, repeated by Nelson in several interviews, is that a 2015 start does not mean 2015 was when thousands of developers sat down to build the game. "Most of the team only started working on GTA VI after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018," the co-studio head explained (ixbt.games). The balance reportedly shifted around 2020, when entire teams began moving onto GTA VI and development became a much larger company-wide effort (Techtroduce) — exactly the "in earnest" moment Take-Two described.
The early phase was about deciding where the game should take place and what that location should represent. According to RockstarINTEL, which reviewed the Trois Couleurs interview, the process begins with the setting — Vice City and the wider state of Leonida for GTA VI — then sees teams travel to Florida to gather references, choosing which cultural details and "special areas" (such as the Everglades) make it into a deliberately "warped version of reality" (RockstarINTEL).
Why Rockstar moves slowly
Nelson used the timeline to explain the studio's approach to satire and ideas: when a game is worked on for this long, trends, memes and political events can become dated before release, so Rockstar is deliberately careful about which subjects it picks (ixbt.games). It is the same reasoning the studio gave for steering clear of Covid and Trump references — a project incubated since 2015 simply cannot chase the news cycle.
The reveal also puts the wait in perspective. By the time GTA VI launches on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, more than eleven years will have passed since the concept phase began (Techtroduce). Rockstar itself has grown along with the project: Nelson has said the company is now more than twice the size it was around Red Dead Redemption 2, with specialist teams across multiple studios working on individual parts of Leonida — including the Los Angeles team responsible for the game's pedestrian and population systems (Techtroduce).
None of this changes what fans will experience on day one, but it does explain how a game announced in 2023 and revealed in 2026 came to carry the weight of an 11-year idea.