Rockstar Gave GTA 6 Devs Free Rein — and Even They Don’t Know Everything in the Game

✅ CONFIRMED

Rockstar North co-studio head Aaron Garbut has admitted that no single person at the company knows everything in Grand Theft Auto 6 — because the studio gave its developers the freedom to sneak their own ideas into Leonida. The admission came in a new behind-the-scenes video from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who visited Rockstar North in Edinburgh and returned with stories that explain why GTA 6 keeps feeling like the biggest game ever made: it might literally be unknowable to the people who built it.

Quick answer: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports that GTA 6’s developers were given free rein to add details they personally thought would be cool, and co-studio head Aaron Garbut says “no one person” knows everything in the game. Rockstar also spent months, if not years, prototyping replacements for the weapon wheel before keeping the classic design, and the art production team grew from 5–6 people on GTA 5 to 65 on GTA 6.

Key takeaways

• Aaron Garbut told Jason Schreier that “no one person” has all of GTA 6 in their head — not even Rockstar’s top developers.
• Rockstar gave individual developers autonomy to add details they found interesting, echoing the famous Red Dead Redemption 2 horse-physics story.
• The team spent months, if not years, prototyping weapon-wheel replacements — trays, webs and interface experiments — before returning to the classic wheel.
• GTA 6’s art production team is 65 people deep, a roughly 10x jump from the five or six who handled art production on GTA 5.
• Artists have been working on GTA 6 since 2015, with research trips to Miami starting the same year — and the team hit a rough creative stretch between 2019 and 2022.

What did Aaron Garbut actually say about GTA 6’s scale?

Garbut told Schreier: “There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head. Grand Theft Auto 6 is a humongous game, like Rockstar’s previous games, and I imagine that not even the top developers of this company know every single thing that’s in the game.” Garbut is no outsider — he is the co-studio head of Rockstar North and a longtime art director who has worked on every major 3D and HD entry in the series.

Schreier, reporting after visiting Rockstar in person to see how GTA 6 is being built, framed the quote as the logical result of the game’s sheer scale and the studio’s development culture. With a decade of work behind it and thousands of contributors, the world of Leonida has grown beyond any one person’s mental map.

Why did Rockstar let GTA 6’s developers add their own ideas?

Because some of the studio’s most beloved details were never on any plan. Schreier points to the famous Red Dead Redemption 2 example — horses with anatomically accurate features that reacted to cold weather — as the model: that detail was not conceived in a feature meeting, it was something an individual developer built because they thought it would be cool and had the time. Garbut said it was not pulled from a master checklist, and the team was never asked to spend extra time on it.

That same loose, creative method carried into GTA 6. Rather than meticulously planning every little detail top-down, Rockstar let developers take initiative on ideas they personally liked. Schreier argues that approach could make GTA 6 the kind of game where players keep finding new things years after launch — a tradition that stretches back to GTA 5’s flip-flops bending against characters’ heels.

What happened to GTA 6’s weapon wheel?

It nearly disappeared. According to Schreier, Rockstar spent months — possibly years — prototyping alternatives to the series’ signature weapon-selection wheel, worried that a familiar, game-like menu would clash with the more grounded sense of what Jason and Lucia could actually carry. Developers experimented with trays, webs and other interface concepts before abandoning the detour and returning to the traditional wheel.

The wheel’s survival is a reminder that even the series’ most recognisable mechanics were up for rethinking during a development cycle this long. It also shows the tension Schreier describes at the heart of the project: balancing Red Dead Redemption’s realistic, systems-driven feel against the faster, more arcade-like rhythm that has always defined Grand Theft Auto.

How much bigger is GTA 6’s art production team than GTA 5’s?

Roughly ten times bigger. ComicBook.com reports that Rockstar confirmed via Schreier that the art production team — the group that turns art assets into a shippable, efficiently used production pipeline — was just five to six developers on Grand Theft Auto V and is now 65 people deep on GTA 6. That kind of growth signals a massive leap in the sheer volume of art assets being created, with less reliance on reused material.

That 10x jump fits everything else Schreier has reported: a game where hand-crafted density, rather than raw square mileage, is the headline ambition. Artists have been on the project since 2015 — just two years after GTA 5 shipped — and that year also marked the start of Rockstar’s research trips to Miami to map out its new Vice City. See our GTA 6 vs GTA 5: every confirmed difference for how the ambition gap shows up in-game.

When did real work on GTA 6 start?

Earlier than most fans assume. Schreier says artists have been on GTA 6 since 2015, with Miami research trips beginning the same year. The road was not smooth: development reportedly hit a rough stretch between 2019 and 2022, when some team members felt the project was moving without clear momentum and staff changes followed — before the vision came together more fully in early 2023.

That timeline explains a lot of what we have covered in recent weeks: a game still being changed months from launch, not yet gone gold as of mid-October, and a development team big enough that its own leaders cannot hold the whole game in their heads. The Bloomberg reporting also notes Rockstar’s pledge not to finish the game by crunching.

GTA 5 vs GTA 6: the development facts

What this means

This is the clearest picture yet of why GTA 6 feels less like a product and more like a place — and it is a smart story for Rockstar to tell 30 days from launch. When the developers themselves cannot catalogue everything in the game, “you’ll be discovering things for years” stops being marketing fluff and becomes a documented production reality. It also reframes the flood of coverage: every screenshot analysis, every frame-by-frame trailer breakdown, even the leaks — they all landed in a world with more detail than any one insider can fully account for.

For players, the takeaway is patience at launch. If Rockstar’s own leadership expects discoveries years down the line, the smart play is to play Leonida slowly. The game arrives November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S — check our GTA 6 release date countdown, pre-load guide and what’s inside the world’s “hundreds” of enterable interiors while you wait.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• DualShockers — Turns Out, Even GTA 6’s Devs Don’t Know Everything That’s in the Game
• ComicBook.com — Rockstar Games Confirms Major Upgrade in GTA 6 From Grand Theft Auto V
• Mezha — GTA 6 Developers Had Freedom to Add Details
• ENM News — Rockstar Gave GTA 6 Devs Free Rein, and the Details Got Wild
• TheG6Hub — “There’s No One Person That Has This Whole Thing in Their Head”

Every claim above was verified against Jason Schreier’s on-the-record reporting and the outlets’ independent write-ups of his video, published October 19, 2026: the Garbut quote was confirmed across all five outlets, the 5–6 → 65 art-production-team figure comes from Rockstar via Schreier as reported by ComicBook.com, and the weapon-wheel prototyping, 2015 artist onboarding, Miami trips and the 2019–2022 rough stretch are reported consistently by Mezha, ENM News and DualShockers. No leaked footage or stolen material was viewed or linked for this article.