For years, fans traded rumors about a secret codename for the next Grand Theft Auto. This week Rockstar finally confirmed it. The game started life as Project Americas, and the plan was huge: a map that stretched across big parts of both North and South America. What will ship on November 19 is one fictional Miami and the land around it.
So what happened to the other continent?
A rare look inside Rockstar
Rockstar almost never talks about how it makes games. That changed when its leaders gave Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier a long interview at the company’s Edinburgh office. In Bloomberg’s feature on the making of Grand Theft Auto VI, the studio describes the project openly for the first time.
The story starts in 2015. Development lead Rob Nelson and a group of senior staff flew to Miami for their first research trip. The goal was to build the new GTA at the same time as Red Dead Redemption 2, the Western that Rockstar was making mainly out of its San Diego office.
That plan did not survive. Finishing Red Dead Redemption 2 pulled in most of the company, and work on the next GTA slid back by years. When the team came back to it, the two-continent idea was cut down to Vice City and its surroundings.
The “dark period”
Even after the scope got smaller, the game did not come together quickly. Nelson calls one stretch of development “a dark period,” a time when the team still could not see what the game was supposed to be. Altogether, making GTA 6 took more than eight years and two delays.
Leadership changed too. Rockstar lost some important people along the way, including co-founder Dan Houser, who left in 2020. Instead of one director, three veterans, Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut, shared the top job under the title “head of development.” Nelson admits the setup probably annoyed some people, but he argues that a single director has problems of its own.
Then there was the size of the company itself. According to Bloomberg, Rockstar had 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018. By August 2026 it had 4,711 people across 12 offices. A 2022 phishing attack also let a hacker steal and leak unfinished footage of the game. Rockstar says it changed its scheduling and overtime pay rules, but it does not claim that crunch (long stretches of extra hours right before a deadline) is gone.
Why one game decides a company’s year
This is where the culture story becomes a money story. Rockstar is owned by Take-Two Interactive, a public company. Take-Two expects net bookings of $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion for the fiscal year that ends in March 2027. Net bookings means the value of everything the company sold in that period, including game sales and in-game purchases. The year before, the number was $6.72 billion.
Almost all of that jump depends on one release. The last game in the series, GTA V, came out in 2013 and has now sold more than 230 million copies. Investors expect its follow-up to carry Take-Two’s whole year.
Other publishers are acting like they believe it too. In May, Xbox pushed its big role-playing game Fable from fall 2026 to February 2027. In its announcement, Xbox listed GTA 6 among the holiday games it was planning around, and said Fable deserved “its own moment.” Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 chose October 23, almost a month before Rockstar’s date.
Hollywood shows what happens when a big release lands in the wrong moment. A famous name does not protect you, as the Digger box office opening proved. Game publishers are simply moving out of the way before the collision.
What Project Americas really tells us
The easy reading is that Rockstar failed to build its dream map. The more useful reading is about trade-offs. Project Americas was the plan of a smaller studio that thought it could make two giant games at once. The game that ships comes from a company almost twice as big, run by a committee instead of one boss, that chose to make one city very dense instead of two continents very thin.
GTA fans waited 13 years between main entries this time, and Take-Two shareholders waited with them. Whether the bigger, slower Rockstar can shorten that gap next time is the real question after November 19.
My take: The map shrank to one city. The company doubled to finish it.