Red Dead Redemption 2’s infamous animated horse testicles, which are realistic enough to contract in cold weather and expand again in heat, were apparently not a Rockstar-mandated feature. As iconic as they have become (a symbol of extraordinary details in the game), they did not originate from a list of features that needed to be added to the game. The horses’ testicles were, instead, the unexpected work of a person, or a group of people, who worked autonomously on the cowboy epic. Journalist Jason Schreier heard this anecdote from Rockstar development chief Aaron Garbut while visiting Rockstar North to write an extensive report for Bloomberg on the making of GTA 6. “Garbut actually mentioned this,” Schreier said in a video on YouTube. “[The horse testicles were] It’s not something that was on a big list of features to do; It wasn’t something that an art director would say to an artist: ‘Okay, we’ve got to get those horse testicles in here; We’d better put them on at night and on weekends so you can fit these horse testicles in here.’ Watch on YouTube “That was something that people, or one person on their own, decided autonomously: ‘Okay, I’m going to do this because I think it’s a really interesting detail and I have enough time to work on it.'” We are verifying the veracity of this anecdote with Rockstar, by the way. And that anecdote is important because it ties into something else Garbut told Schreier, which was that no one at Rockstar knows everything in GTA 6 because it’s too big and detailed to do so. “There is no person who has all this in their head,” Garbut apparently said. “There’s not a single person who has all of this in their head” -Aaron Garbut That, coupled with the fact that developers apparently have “autonomy to put in cool stuff,” Schreier said, means there could be another unexpected feature like horse testicles in GTA 6. And given the nudity-related GTA 6 video leaks we’ve already had, maybe the features aren’t that far off. Schreier’s video revealed some other facts learned on his journey to Rockstar. He was told that the roads in GTA 6 are “significantly narrower” than in GTA 5, apparently, so players feel the effects of traffic more, a detail that relates to the higher levels of realism in GTA 6. He also heard how some artists had been working on GTA 6 for 11 years, and while there were “five out of six” people on GTA 5’s art production team, there were – or are – 65 people on the art production team. of GTA 6. Note that Rockstar as a company has roughly doubled in size since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, going from 2,441 employees to 4,711 across 12 offices. There’s also information about the origins of the ‘hold left trigger’ contextual interaction system introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2, which again, apparently came from someone working freelance on the game, Phil Hooker (now CTO), rather than one of the game’s creative leads. Also, apparently a lot of experiments were done to find a replacement for GTA’s radial menu, but in the end, the team returned to it. Grand Theft Auto 6 will, of course, be released in a month, on November 19. However, the road to launch has been bumpy, with Rockstar North currently involved in an employment tribunal in Scotland over the alleged unfair dismissals of 31 employees, and with a series of gameplay footage leaks exposing GTA 6 in ways that are beyond Rockstar’s control.
