Rockstar Traveled Across Florida With Gang Members and Cops for GTA 6 Research

Love Magazine recently got an exclusive interview with Rockstar Games ahead of GTA 6’s release next month. While the interview focuses primarily on the love story between dual protagonists Jason and Lucia, there’s some interesting insight into the studio’s process for creating the most impressive virtual worlds ever made.

For its rendition of Florida, team members spent lots of time embedding with the culture and exploring the landscape of Miami and its surrounding areas. These research trips start small as the leads scout out the most interesting locations and stories, and more team members come on subsequent trips to dive deeper into the culture, stories, and people.

“Every game we make starts with research trips. It’s where to get to explore both the place and our ideas as a group,” head of development Aaron Garbut said. “To begin, a small group of us spent some time traveling from Miami through some of the surrounding towns and through the Florida Keys down to Key West. This is one of the best parts of the entire project: a car full of friends, driving for days on end, talking about what we want to make and being immersed in the locations and our ideas.”

Garbut takes a camera and a phone and records everything that happens. During one shoot, a handful of Rockstar devs spent the day flying low and fast over mangrove inlets in the everglades, before ending the day hovering over a stadium with a live Beyonce concert playing. “I think we made the local news that day,” Garbut said.

“We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can. We travel around with cops and with gang members. Everyone is lovely. Some people are equally scary. We experience the underside as well; although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we’ve met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying. We try to build a world that is believable and varied, with depth, so that is the research we need.

“Miami itself is really those extremes — lovely people, incredible wealth, incredible poverty, excess, craziness, the hustle, and showing it all off. That’s our research trips — experiencing those extremes so that we can bring them into our world, and it all finds its way into the game in surprising ways.”

Some of those surprising ways could be pedestrian dialogue or radio shows and advertisements, which Rockstar said it doesn’t treat as secondary content. Everything is important when creating a world you want players to spend hundreds of hours exploring.

Rockstar’s approach to a GTA game set in the modern day is to deliberately avoid recreating real-world viral moments, since long development timelines mean these kinds of references can date a game — ask Borderlands. Instead, GTA 6’s satire focuses on modern culture, conspiracy theories, and “the strange ways people react to events.”

Last week, local team the Miami Heat announced a special match, during which the Heat will wear a GTA 6 uniform in a themed arena. We’ve got extensive coverage of GTA 6 across IGN. Check out IGN’s interview with Rockstar Games, our GTA 6 preview, and word of the first confirmed GTA 6 voice actor.