Rockstar Games’ next big release has reportedly been in development for years, yet the details remain scarce.

A former Rockstar Games developer has revealed exactly how long Grand Theft Auto VI has been in the works, and depending on how closely you’ve followed the GTA VI rumor mill, it might be far longer than expected—or just as long as you’d guessed. When the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI dropped in November 2023, the internet went into a frenzy. Of course, the game’s existence had been officially confirmed much earlier, and in September 2022, early gameplay footage surfaced online after a breach of Rockstar Games’ internal network, giving us our first unofficial look at the game.

This much means we can confirm that development started sometime before 2022. However, judging by the state of the game at the time, it’s hardly a stretch to think work had begun several years earlier. The only other trustworthy source about the game’s development is Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who has stated that work on Grand Theft Auto VI only ramped up seriously in 2018, after Red Dead Redemption II was released. Now, in a recent Kiwi Talkz podcast interview, former Rockstar Games developer David O’Reilly cryptically revealed that development started in 2018.

According to O’Reilly in the interview, he spent five years working on the title. A Reddit user calculated that since O’Reilly left Rockstar in 2023, that means (by the time the game is actually released) Grand Theft Auto VI will have had at least an eight-year development cycle. Of course, just because O’Reilly began working on the project in 2018 doesn’t mean that’s when the team as a whole started; and this also doesn’t account for the pre-production and planning phases before full development began.

It’s possible that preparations for Grand Theft Auto VI began not long after Rockstar Games launched Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2013. If Rockstar eventually reveals the true development timeline, it wouldn’t be a shock if GTA VI ends up being the product of a decade-long process.

Source: Gamingbible