GTA 6 has been in development longer than you thought, dev confirms

A former Rockstar Games developer just let slip exactly how long Grand Theft Auto VI has been in development, and it’s either way longer than you assumed or exactly how long you assumed (depending on how much attention you’ve been paying to all of the GTA VI leaks).

When the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI dropped back in November 2023, the internet lost its collective minds.

Of course, we had official confirmation of GTA VI’s existence long before that first trailer, and we even got our first look at it from an unofficial source back in September 2022, when early gameplay footage leaked online following a “network intrusion” at Rockstar Games.

So, at the very least, we can confirm that development had begun at some point prior to 2022. However, given the state that the game was in at the time, it’s no stretch of the imagination to assume that development started a few years beforehand.

The only other source we have to go on regarding its development is Bloomberg’s Jason Schrierer, who stated that development on GTA VI “only started in earnest” following the release of Red Dead Redemption II in 2018.

Well, that was our only other source… until now.

In a recent interview with the Kiwi Talkz podcast, former Rockstar Games dev David O'Reilly revealed, in a rather roundabout way, that development started in 2018.

As O’Reilly states in the clip, he worked on the game for five years. One user over on the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit did the maths and figured out that, as O’Reilly left Rockstar Games in 2023, this means that (by the time the game actually comes out) GTA VI would have had a development time of roughly eight years (at a minimum).

Of course, just because O’Reilly started work on the project in 2018, that doesn’t mean that he came on board when work truly began. Also, that’s not even taking pre-production into account.

I’d wager that GTA VI went into pre-production not long after Rockstar Games published GTA V back in 2013. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this game was a decade-long process, once Rockstar Games reveals the true production timescale in the future.