"Please tell me you're kidding": what Bloomberg's GTA 6 making-of says about the two delays

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published a long feature on the making of Grand Theft Auto 6 on 14 October, built on interviews with Rockstar's own leadership rather than anonymous staff. It is behind a paywall, so this is what it says as reported by the outlets that have read it, and only the parts more than one of them agree on.

The headline moment is a phone call. Then a second one.

Two calls to Strauss Zelnick

When the first trailer went out in December 2023 it said 2025, and Rockstar's leaders told Bloomberg they believed it at the time. As the date got closer, Rockstar North concluded it needed longer. The team went to Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, and she phoned Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick to move the game to May 2026. He agreed.

Months later she had to call him again, this time for November. Kolbe recalls his first response as: "You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding." By her account he came round once the reasons were laid out, and she made the point that a lot of executives in his chair would simply have ordered the team to ship.

Zelnick's own line in the piece is that giving a game more time is usually a wise investment of time and money. That is the same position he took at Take-Two's annual meeting in September, where a shareholder put the delays to him directly. The difference is that this time somebody in the room has described what it sounded like when he heard.

Why it slipped

According to the leadership Bloomberg spoke to, there was no single disaster. There were a very large number of moving parts that did not come together as fast as planned, and one of the central ones was people on screen: Rockstar did not have the capacity to write and animate the number of characters the world needed.

That fits everything Rockstar has chosen to show since. The studio's own marketing has leaned on crowds and strangers rather than set pieces, including the 600,000 animations and the claim that behaviour is the hardest thing in the game to build. If the bottleneck was populating Leonida with people who behave like people, the delay and the pitch are the same story.

Three heads instead of one

After Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018 Rockstar put essentially the whole company on GTA 6. Several senior figures left in that period, most prominently co-founder Dan Houser, who had been the lead writer on most of the studio's games. Rather than replace him with a single director, head of development was shared between three people: Aaron Garbut, Phil Hooker and Rob Nelson.

Bloomberg reports some staff complained about too many cooks. Nelson acknowledged that view and argued that one person at the top brings problems of its own. Garbut's summary of the whole effort was that the last thirty years had been practice for this.

How it squares with what we reported

This site reported in September that early work on GTA 6 began in 2015, with full production from 2020. Bloomberg's version, that the studio moved over after Red Dead 2 in 2018, does not contradict that. Early work is a small team. Moving the whole company is a different thing, and the two dates describe both.

What it does not tell you

The feature does not give a budget figure, though it describes the game as very likely the most expensive ever made. It does not say whether the November date was ever itself in doubt, and Rob Nelson told Famitsu this month, laughing, that the game will definitely come out on 19 November. Rockstar's leaders also told Bloomberg the next game will not take eight years, because the engine, the tools and the team now exist. That is a promise about 2030-something, and worth remembering then.