Exclusive: Esquire Australia got behind the wheel of GTA VI ahead of its extended look on Netflix
Ahead of Grant Theft Auto VI’s highly anticipated November release, we go behind the scenes of its development headquarters
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“IN THIS WORLD, you’re not a God.” Rob Nelson, Rockstar North’s head of development, says while wielding a PS5 controller and mitigating a tense interaction with a Non-Playable Character (NPC) on the screen in front of us. “You are very capable, but you’re not the only one capable of violence.”
I’m sitting in the offices of Rockstar North, the home of Grand Theft Auto and Rockstar Games’ Scottish HQ in Edinburgh. My jaw is on the floor, and in an attempt to process what I’m being shown, I am frantically scribbling observations in my notebook, like: ‘Car dynamics! Gran Turismo, who?!’ ‘Drinking alcohol = inebriation.’ ‘Fashion easter eggs.’ ‘Doggy poop bags can be flung at NPCs.’ And, ‘GTAVI teaching incels how to relationship?’
Unfolding in front of my eyes is a mix of anarchy, chaos, satire, controversy, social mechanics, surprise and pure, undulated violence: a preview of Grand Theft Auto VI – the long-awaited, eighth main series iteration of a franchise that, for 29 years, has incited moral panic, media storms and political outrage. Not to mention, pioneered open-world, sandbox gameplay to change entertainment forever. Throw in a decade-plus wait, multiple launch delays, countless memes and a brand-new political and social landscape to poke fun at, and come it’s offical release on November 19, GTAVI’s unveiling will be one of the biggest entertainment moments in modern history.
Quantifying the significance and impact of GTA is almost as difficult as trying to unpack how the new game has been developed; though, here, we’ll attempt both. First, there’s the numbers. US$10billion: the revenue figure GTA has reportedly surpassed. Over 470 million: units sold since 1997, with more than 230 million attributed to GTAV alone. Seven: GTA’s Guinness World Records count, including fastest entertainment property to gross US$1billion (GTAV, in three days). 475 million: the cross-platform views GTAVI’s second trailer had within 24-hours – the first racked up over 93 million in a day to become YouTube’s biggest non-music video drop. Compare these numbers to the biggest box office debuts and, in this sense, it makes the James Bond, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Avatar, and Spider-Man series look small fry. Then, there’s the cultural impact, which gets far stickier.
Grand Theft Auto V might be the most iconic and well-known in the series, but by the time of its arrival in 2013 as the seventh main series release, GTA already had a chokehold on pop culture. The first four main games were released between 1997 and 2002, amid a moment when street violence was enmeshed in the zeitgeist – in the wake of OJ Simpson’s infamous Bronco chase, alongside the Columbine shooting, World’s Wildest Police Videos, The Sopranos and a crime-obsessed America. Globally, video game violence and classification dominated the political agenda, while The Fast and The Furious-esque car culture became youth culture.
Here was a franchise that revolved around white-knuckle heists, frenzied carjacking, blood-spattering shooter rampages, Pimp My Ride-esque car mods and assaults on pedestrians, sex workers, Hare Krishnas and Elvis impersonators – all while running from the cops at speed in a sick lowrider muscle car. It was a perfect storm. GTA traded on a satirical lens of America, with a hard bite that spared no one, from Wall Street to Hollywood to Washington DC. It thrilled players by triggering something feral in their psyche via a stylish, open licence for chaos. Prior to GTA, no game had ever given its players so much agency, amoral freedom and permission to be bad.
GTAVI is set in the fictional state of Leonida with Vice City as its heart, a denser, larger, more detailed rebuild of the Miami-inspired setting first introduced in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002). As a fictional reimagining of Florida, the game’s map extends to island archipelagos (Leonida Keys), Everglades-style wetlands (Grassrivers), forested highlands (Mount Kalaga National Park), a run-down industrial port (Port Gellhorn) and a rural sugar-refinery town (Ambrosia).
To put this into context, Rockstar Games confirmed to us that the map is twice the size of GTAV. Vice City is double GTAV’s Los Santos, and the built-up area outside of Vice City is eleven times that of greater Los Santos. It’s also three times the playable area of Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ release with the most expansive world to-date, which helped lay much of the groundwork for GTVI. For those unfamiliar with the metric, this is an enormous playground.
The narrative centres on Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, Rockstar’s first dual protagonists and, in Lucia’s case, the series’ first major female lead (GTAVI is single-player, so you switch between the two). Like a bad-ass Bonnie and Clyde, the duo are partners in crime, and – hint: depending on how you play the game – love; a young criminal couple on the run with a shared desperation to escape their situation, doing what they need to survive. It’s the most emotionally ambitious narrative swing the studio has ever attempted and allows for a multitude of fresh dynamics.
“The fact that they’re in a relationship presents a whole new set of challenges, as opposed to Trevor, Michael and Franklin from GTAV, who lived partly connected, but separate lives,” explains Nelson. This relationship affects gameplay in a few ways – their money goes into a joint bank account (carried cash is separate, but vulnerable), if one gets ‘wasted’, both are out, and during a robbery, you can work together to stake out or hit a place, or split up to shake the cops off your tail. But there’s a more human story at play too, and relationship dynamics have become part of the fun.
During our gameplay as Jason, a text pops up from Lucia, letting us know where she’s at. It turns out, ghosting your partner might lead to some coldness, depending on how long you ignore them. “You take care of the relationship by just spending time together or checking in with each other,” says Nelson.
This also includes things like holding hands, going on dates, shopping, driving around or just hanging out at one of the safe houses, all of which strengthens their bond.
“You should be able to go a couple of game days without necessarily spending time together, as long as you’re checking in. If I stay out a little longer, she’ll check in at eleven o’clock and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to bed, locking up, hope you’re good.’”
As long as you answer, it’s cool.
“It’s not like ‘you should have come home last night,’ because we don’t want it to be a naggy relationship. But if a few days pass, they may go, ‘Hey, we haven’t spent any time together; is everything good?’ And if you don’t respond, it just chills a little bit.”
The relationship is designed so that if it’s a narrative you’re interested in, you have to work at it. But if not, it doesn’t become a burden. The partner dynamic makes for funny art-imitating-life moments, such as deciding how you actively treat your partner. On the screen, Jason and Lucia are now standing together, and Nelson gestures: “If you’re high [in relationship status], you can do this: [the couple hug in a romantic embrace]. It’s all about trying to make this stuff feel very tactile.”
What GTA has always done best is create intricate moments of serendipity. Sure, there’s frenzied flashes of terror, but also beauty. From taking a cruise in your car at golden hour, to stumbling upon a shipwreck while diving, or engaging in lifestyle activities for fun (including sports).
In GTAV, you could flick on the radio and be dropped into a hilarious universe of shock jocks, has-been rockstars, conspiracy theorists and new age spiritualists – all of it soundtracked to a genre-spanning, curated mix that doubled as a love letter to the culture it was parodying. In GTAIV, you could watch a comedy show performed by Ricky Gervais or Katt Williams.
It’s an approach Rockstar Games has been obsessively refining for nearly two decades to shatter any perception of what a video game can be. In GTAVI, the safe houses are more interactive than ever, food and beverage is in-play and more media has been created for this game than imaginable. The score plays a more dynamic role, and there’s hours of TV and video, ironic infomercials, wry culture-spearing easter eggs, and now, smartphone apps.
If you’re wondering how Rockstar Games could ever parody an America where we’ve got Nitro Circus at the White House, a conspiracy theorist US Health Secretary, the black bagging of the Venezuelan president and POTUS spruiking his Truth Social subscription service, all – as the meme says – ‘before we got GTAVI’, fear not, the game is as sharp, subversive and brutal as ever. Though COVID doesn’t exist in the GTAVI universe, desperate, overexcited YouTuber-types do. There’s an Instagram-like app called Snapmatic, for example, where influencer culture gets hilariously lampooned, and you can thumb through your following, or just browse the app. Yep, in GTAVI, you can even doomscroll.
The diversity of Leonida lends itself to millions of moments-within-moments, chief among them, the game’s iconic NPCs. Brought forward in every technical way, each character, their dialogue and their wardrobe are specifically tied to location and time of day. Should you find yourself out committing a crime at 7am in Vice City, as we did, you’re likely to encounter a morning crowd of runners, fitness bros and dog walkers – parodied to extremes, naturally. The level of cinematic detail is outstanding – from the variety of heights of pedestrians to their hair and fabric movement, their expressions and their outfits. Then, there’s the more immersive focus that’s been applied to the wider world-building, including a huge amount of retail stores, businesses, leisure activities, daily life moments, dynamic weather, environmental aspects and thousands of side-quests and unlockable features, all rewarded through curiosity.
As we’re walking around Vice City’s beach promenade, tens of NPCs are loitering and some are interacting with each other. Here, every choice has consequences. GTAVI’s NPCs are more unpredictable, and some might be carrying concealed weapons, so choose your approach wisely – this is what Nelson meant by, “You’re not a god.”
“If I lock onto a group of NPCs, stay focused on them, they stay focused on me. But if I’m invading their space and being a weirdo, they’ll start to go: ‘What are you doing?!’” he says, moving Jason closer to a group of women discussing their dating lives, dressed in activewear. As predicted, the women get agitated, yell at Jason, and others start to notice. “There’s a lot more [NPCs] than we have ever had before, with a lot more complexity and a lot more lines per character,” says Nelson. “They all look different and appropriate to their location. It’s wild.”
Achieving this level of happenstance involved multiple teams having to map out the matrix of how every choice could play out. “You have a very broad spectrum of teams needing to work together to make this all work; so that when the NPCs are walking, they head track, they look, they don’t completely stop. Or, they’re sitting there, and you just come over and they look at you. But equally, I could be saying very rude things and they’re going to get up, or I could pull a gun. They have to have all of these different ways of existing and reacting to what a player does at any point.”
Then, there’s the nature of timing each interaction. “How long does it last? How do they react? All the possible things I can say to them – greets, taunts, defuses, provokes… And this is all before we’ve drawn a gun or thrown a punch.” Behind the scenes are teams of writers, directors, producers, art directors, actors and more, all working to make sure the NPCs look and sound unique and make sense within their environments – and this is just the characters – then, there’s the vehicles, the objects and the playable scenarios to be found within the (brain) melting pot of Leonida.
“We really wanted to evolve our population, and to do that, we had to completely rethink how that would work. And it involved a lot of studying human behaviour,” says Nelson. For 25 years, a field research team has worked in the shadows of GTA, visiting locations, speaking to locals and eavesdropping on conversations, all in the pursuit of diversity, humour and a replicated, if not slightly warped, reality. Rockstar Games has contacts developed over decades and a dedicated team that makes new ones.
This includes gun dealers and former police and task force, all the way through to club owners and, for this game, your random Florida Man. “We find anyone who will talk to and spend time with us. We go hang out with them, and you just never know where you’re going one day to the next. It’s incredible.” He smiles. “You’re out in the Everglades one day and then back in the city in some crazy club ‘til 4:30 in the morning. And then, at Sebring racetrack the next morning getting driven around in an insanely fast car. Other teams are going on ride-alongs with cops at night. We’re asking everyone we encounter as many questions as we can. They’re really generous with their time and information and we just start building up ideas from that.” All of this real-world research then gets distilled, layered and absorbed meticulously and strategically into the GTA narrative universe.
The scale and possibilities that live within this iteration of GTA are near-unfathomable, and Rockstar Games will be continuing to finesse GTAVI, right up to its release.
What else to expect? Well, there’s a new layer of criminal and financial progression built into the game, in terms of what you can steal and when; robberies are much more interesting and unpredictable and the way you handle every NPC interaction can affect your ‘criminal profile.’ Should you choose to rain all hell down on Vice City, be prepared for Vice City to rain hell back down on you. Money is more important, with new ways to earn, steal and spend cash; and weapons, how they are carried and accessed have had a bit of an RDR2-saddle makeover (read: car as a storage place). The police chase scenes have been intensified and the cops no longer appear on a radar, which forces a deep immersion into what’s happening on-screen. Vehicles might be a little trickier to drive, but the payoff is more of everything across mods, vehicle variety, traffic simulations, incredibly detailed graphics and nerve-shredding driving scenarios.
While every vehicle is stealable, the cars themselves have undergone a more stratified approach, in terms of how you can lift them to climb the game’s capitalistic ladder of object ownership through crime. The lighting is stunning, the scenery is magnificent and all interiors are superbly designed. Underneath it all is a universe of autonomy, serendipity, humour and curiosity that collides with the mayhem and snowballing storylines of Vice City: psychopathic gangs, dodgy executives, unhinged mob bosses, dizzying heist sequences, drugs, guns, sex and a lawless road to the depths of damnation.
The Grand Theft Auto VI will be the 17th game in the entire series (including mobile, handheld, expansion packs and an online version), each more sophisticated, layered, entertaining and violent than the last, and it will be available as both a Standard and an Ultimate Edition, with the latter offering more vehicles, weapons, apparel and more. Come November, it arrives to invite a new generation to lose themselves and unleash their own maniacal carnage in equal parts disgust and delight. How you choose to play with it all will be up to you.
Grand Theft Auto VI Standard and Ultimate Editions will arrive November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Pre-orders are open now; rockstargames.com/VI/editions
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