With Grand Theft Auto 6 nearly one month away, Rockstar is finally ready to talk about a game that has been wrapped in secrecy. A steady stream of interviews has told us more about how the game works, and more importantly, how it came to be. The latest example of that comes by way of Bloomberg, where reporter Jason Schreier visited Rockstar North’s Scotland office and spoke to the team about its eight-year development journey.
But the juiciest detail in that report doesn’t detail what GTA 6 is; it’s what it isn’t that stands out most. The original vision for the open-world game, as far back as 2015, would have players not exploring just one city but “big swaths of land across both North and South America.” That project was codenamed “Project Americas” — and those two words might be enough to give you goosebumps if you were terminally online in 2020. Before GTA 6 was properly revealed in 2023, fans were desperate for any information about the game.
Perhaps fueled by COVID-induced boredom, 2020 and 2021 were a hotbed for rumors. Leaks became currency on sites like Reddit, where so-called insiders seemed to have a hot new detail every day. One week, it was that the game would feature seasonal map changes, a la Fortnite.
Next, it was that it would feature cryptocurrency. Every once and while, someone would chime in and claim Dr. Dre would be in the game.
Some rumors sounded plausible, while others read like absurd fan fiction from people who were setting themselves up for a colossal disappointment. The most ridiculous rumor? The rumor, which caught on like wildfire in 2020, was that GTA 6 was going to be set in multiple cities spread across America, bucking the established trend in the series of playing out in one city per game.
Suddenly, supposed leakers came out of the woodwork to add fuel to the theory. We started seeing regular “map leaks,” which suggested that the game would send players to Rockstar’s take on Cuba. People began investigating domain registrations to figure out which cities the game would feature.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
