In 2015, a group of Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto developers made their first trips to Miami to conduct field research for the next game in the phenomenally popular crime series. “Before you go on hyper-organized research trips, you immerse yourself in the place and its history, its environment,” Rob Nelson, one of GTA VI’s lead developers, tells me. “[You see] the physical places you want the characters to move through, the experiences you want them to have, and the juxtaposition between the extremes of society that are in Miami.” I wondered: Did people ever recognize them on any of their research trips? Did the locals know what they were doing? After all, this is the biggest game in the world; I imagine it would be difficult to go completely undercover. “We’re always semi-undercover,” he says. “But if you have a bunch of idiots going through a scary situation “Grand Theft Auto VI is finally out next week, more than 10 years after those first exploratory trips. A few weeks ago, I spent the day at Rockstar North headquarters in Edinburgh, watching as Nelson and fellow executive Jennifer Kolbe took me through Vice City, the fictional version of Miami that has emerged from all that work. The setting always comes first for Rockstar games: developers immerse themselves in the real-life version of the place they want to create, before asking what they want to do. This time, that story is about a criminal couple on the run called Jason and Lucia. Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) evoke fascinatingly detailed versions of the US: one, a microcosm of California, the other, of the old virtual Florida. Rockstar, has gratuitous and absurd details, from the macro level to the micro; from the architecture and geography to the smallest details, like the clothes pedestrians wear, the street art, the leaflets on the walls of cafes and the inside of refrigerators. As Nelson and I freely explored Vice City, we discussed the effort and motivations that went into creating this ultra-maximalist game. reach of most developers… Grand Theft Auto VI Photo: Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto VI was created by a huge team of almost 5,000 people, but there are a relatively small number of decision-makers at the top, most of whom have been at Rockstar for a long time (head writer Rupert Humphries, for example, has been with the company since 2008). that no one could ever get enough of in their head,” Nelson tells me. His purview is design, narrative, and animation, with a bit of additional casting: Nelson’s background is in character art and animation, and his attention to detail is very evident in his game demo. He loves to show me little details, like the way Jason eats a hot dog or how, while walking through a gas station, he can bite into a donut with one hand while drinking a beer with the other. When Jason starts running, he puts on the pack of six beers he carries in the crook of his arm, and the liquid inside the bottles sloshes around. At one point in my journey in Vice City, Nelson is briefly upset during a jewelry store robbery when the location of one of the security guards’ feet doesn’t look right. The level of detail in this game is simply beyond the reach of any other game developer thanks to Rockstar’s abundance of money and time, and the patience of its parent company, Take-Two Interactive. having enough in your head’… Vice City, Grand Theft Auto’s fictional version of Miami Photo: Rockstar Games Rockstar’s worlds are believable because, despite their rampant excess, they are based on the real places they are based on and the real experiences the developers had in those places. In Liberty City, inspired by New York, “people who had lived in New York all their lives went to places they would never go… Then we give that experience to the players.” nightclub in Miami until 4 in the morning and then get up a few hours later to hit a race track with a major hangover. They went for a ride with cops in South Beach and hung out in strange bars in the Florida Keys. “They are very intrepid,” he says. “They’re going to wander around all kinds of places with their cameras. They’re not afraid.” Rockstar is famous for its depictions of the US, particularly American cities. But I’ve always wondered what this team could do in a different environment. Could Rockstar ever imagine a GTA set outside of the United States? “Never say never, but there is still a lot to do in the United States,” says Nelson. I wonder if Rockstar’s outsider status, as a group of developers primarily based outside the US (although it has offices in New York and San Diego), gives it a unique view of a country so vast and full of contradictions. “I think we’re all aliens to this version of America,” he says. “It doesn’t matter where you live…no one experiences the America we’re portraying here in its fullness.” chubby raccoon trying to rebuild the sanctuary he calls home. I played an early version on the Tokyo game show a couple of years ago and was delighted to find that it turned out brilliantly. “Arriving alongside November’s Blue Wave, Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is a game of quiet restoration perfectly suited to the current moment,” as writer Christian Donlan puts it in a review published this week. “Available on: Xbox (on Game Pass), Switch, PC Estimated play time: six hours skip newsletter promotion Subscribe to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion What to read The role of AI is a hot topic at the games awards, as the studio behind Big Walk discovered. Photograph: House House Brilliant indie co-op darling Big Walk has been bogged down in AI controversy after the festival awards of indie games to issue a statement on their stance on the use of large language models in nominated games. In what appears to be an abundance of caution, the developers of Big Walk’s House revealed to IGF jurors that they used an LLM to help solve a coding problem during the game’s development. The fallout has illustrated how vociferous anti-AI sentiment is among game creatives and has raised difficult questions about where to draw the line when hiring a historian/librarian to help. to preserve and document the creation of its games and hardware, a documentary film about the final years of legendary developer BioWare is coming, from Canada’s Super Channel. The studio was shut down by EA last month after a 30-year run creating some of the most influential RPGs ever created. Photo: Rockstar Games my son and so he agrees not to mess it up (teenagers these days seem to exploit the story mode, while I like to savor it). In a world where South Park contained spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2, how the hell can we avoid them? Any advice?” creating your own experience, choosing what to do and how to spend your time, how Jason and Lucia act. And no one can mess it up. If you have a question for the Question Block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.
