GTA 6 has been in development since 2015, five years earlier than assumed

Rockstar has said that early work on Grand Theft Auto 6 began in 2015, with full production starting in 2020.

That makes this an eleven-year project from first work to release, and a six-year one from full production.

What 2015 actually means

It is worth being precise, because the number is going to get flattened into a headline. Early work in 2015 does not mean a team of hundreds building Vice City for eleven years. In practice it means concepting, technology research, and a small group working out what the game is while the rest of the studio was elsewhere.

Where the studio was in 2015 is the useful context. Grand Theft Auto V had arrived on PC in April of that year, Grand Theft Auto Online was becoming the business it is now, and Red Dead Redemption 2 was in production for its 2018 release.

So the sequence is: finish Grand Theft Auto V's rollout, start thinking about the next one, build Red Dead Redemption 2 with the bulk of the studio, then move that team onto full Grand Theft Auto 6 production in 2020.

Six years of full production is the real number

A 2020 production start for a 2026 release puts this game between its two predecessors rather than in some unprecedented category. Red Dead Redemption 2 took longer.

What has changed is not the length so much as the cost per year. The scale described elsewhere, including over 600,000 animations and a dedicated Los Angeles team working only on non-player characters, is what six years of full production buys at 2026 prices.

What eleven years does to a game

Two things, and they are in tension.

Technology shifts underneath you. A project that started concepting in 2015 was aimed at a console generation that did not exist yet, and everything built in the first few years has to survive contact with hardware nobody had specified. Some of it will not have.

And the world changes. A satire of contemporary America conceived in 2015 lands in a 2026 that is not the one anybody was writing for. Rockstar's setting is modern-day Miami with an in-game social feed running through the trailers, which is the most datable possible choice, and the studio has had to keep re-aiming at a target that will not hold still.

The part that is hard to imagine

Rob Nelson has separately said the game has grown so large that nobody on the team knows the whole of it. A project where the co-head of the studio says that out loud is a project that has passed the point where any individual can hold it in their head.

That is either the most exciting thing about this game or the most worrying one, depending on your disposition, and nobody outside Rockstar will know which until November.