Author: AISLOP Research Unit Date: 14 May 2026 Citation style: Harvard Subject: Earliest reported preliminary work on Grand Theft Auto VI following the release of Grand Theft Auto V, and the lead-up to Red Dead Redemption 2
The popular perception that Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI) was a rapid, post-pandemic undertaking by Rockstar Games is contradicted by the documentary record. Multiple sources, most prominently Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and the Wikipedia article on the game, place the genesis of GTA VI as far back as 2014, only months after the September 2013 launch of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (Schreier, 2022; Wikipedia, 2026a). At that stage, "development" did not denote full production in the modern sense; rather, it referred to preliminary, exploratory work undertaken in parallel with other Rockstar commitments, most notably the multi-year build-out of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). This report examines what that preliminary 2014 activity is likely to have entailed, why it remained low-intensity for several years, and how it set the foundations that early development would inherit when it formally ramped up in late 2018 (Wikipedia, 2026a; Wikipedia, 2025).
Bloomberg, via Schreier's reporting, frames the 2014 work as preparatory rather than productive: concepting, internal pitching, light prototyping, narrative brainstorming, and technology evaluation, conducted by a comparatively small group inside Rockstar (Schreier, 2022). This pattern mirrors the studio's earlier practice: preliminary work on RDR2 likewise began shortly after the 2010 release of the original Red Dead Redemption, with Rockstar San Diego producing a rough story outline by mid-2011 and rough scripts by late 2012, years before principal production scaled up (Wikipedia, 2025). Applied to GTA VI, the same template suggests that 2014 activity likely included: initial setting and protagonist explorations (eventually settling on a Vice City–centred return inspired by Florida); early storyboards and narrative sketches; engineering investigations of how the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) could be evolved for the next console generation; and early discussions of how an online component, riding on the runaway success of Grand Theft Auto Online, might integrate into a successor title (Schreier, 2022; Wikipedia, 2026a).
It is important to distinguish this phase from "full production". Schreier later reported that GTA VI only entered principal production around 2020, under the code name Project Americas, with early development beginning in late 2018 once RDR2 had shipped (Wikipedia, 2026a). The 2014 phase, therefore, is best understood as a long-running incubation: a small cohort kept the project alive on paper while Rockstar's broader workforce was directed elsewhere.
Two contextual factors explain the 2014 start date. First, GTA V's commercial performance was unprecedented for an entertainment release, generating enormous expectation for a successor and giving Rockstar both the financial latitude and the strategic obligation to begin thinking about the next instalment immediately (Schreier, 2022). Second, Rockstar was simultaneously porting GTA V to eighth-generation hardware (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in late 2014, and Windows in 2015), an exercise the studio later described as a technical proving ground for those consoles—work that directly informed RDR2's engine targets (Wikipedia, 2025). It was therefore organisationally sensible to keep GTA VI in a low-intensity, exploratory state while the bulk of the company consolidated around RDR2.
Rockstar's "one large team" model, in which all of its global studios were co-opted into a single production for RDR2, meant that staffing GTA VI at scale before RDR2 wrapped was simply not feasible (Wikipedia, 2025). Around 2,000 people ultimately contributed to RDR2, and Rockstar's working culture during that period—since widely reported as involving extended crunch—left little surplus capacity for a parallel flagship (Wikipedia, 2025). The consequence was that GTA VI's 2014 inception remained a slow burn for roughly four years.
Between 2014 and the October 2018 release of RDR2, the preliminary GTA VI effort would have absorbed lessons from the surrounding pipeline. RDR2's recording sessions reportedly began in 2013, its writing matured through the mid-2010s, and its engine and tool refinements—particularly around dense open-world simulation, NPC behaviour, and online infrastructure—provided a template that a future GTA could adopt (Wikipedia, 2025). Schreier's reporting indicates that, following the controversy over RDR2's crunch, Rockstar consciously sought to restructure the GTA VI effort as "a moderately sized release" that would expand over time, explicitly to avoid replicating the prior project's working conditions (Schreier, 2022; Wikipedia, 2026a). That intent is itself evidence that GTA VI's identity was being shaped during the RDR2 years, not invented from scratch afterwards.
By late 2018, with RDR2 shipped, Rockstar was finally in a position to transition GTA VI from preliminary work into early development proper, with principal production following around 2020 (Wikipedia, 2026a). The 2014 phase therefore functions as the connective tissue between two eras of Rockstar output: the GTA V era that justified its existence, and the RDR2 era whose technology, personnel, and process reforms it ultimately inherited.
The reported 2014 origin of Grand Theft Auto VI is neither dramatic nor contradictory once placed in context. It reflects Rockstar's standard practice of seeding successor projects almost immediately after a flagship release, while the bulk of the studio remains absorbed by an intervening title—in this case, Red Dead Redemption 2. The preliminary work likely consisted of concepting, narrative scaffolding, and technology scouting carried out by a small team, with the project deliberately kept in low gear until RDR2 had cleared the runway. Recognising this long incubation reframes the eventual 2026 release not as a delayed sprint, but as the culmination of more than a decade of intermittent groundwork.
Schreier, J. (2022) Take-Two's Rockstar Games Vows Less Crunch, More Sensitivity in Next Grand Theft Auto. Bloomberg, 28 July. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-07-28/take-two-rockstar-grand-theft-auto-vi-aims-to-address-strip-club-toxic-culture (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025) Red Dead Redemption 2. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026b) Development of Red Dead Redemption 2. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).