GTA 6 has been in development since 2015, five years earlier than assumed

Rockstar has said that early work on Grand Theft Auto 6 began in 2015, with full production starting in 2020.

That makes this an eleven-year project from first work to release, and a six-year one from full production.

What 2015 actually means

It is worth being precise, because the number is going to get flattened into a headline. Early work in 2015 does not mean a team of hundreds building Vice City for eleven years. In practice it means concepting, technology research, and a small group working out what the game is while the rest of the studio was elsewhere.

Where the studio was in 2015 is the useful context. Grand Theft Auto V had arrived on PC in April of that year, Grand Theft Auto Online was becoming the business it is now, and Red Dead Redemption 2 was in production for its 2018 release.

So the sequence is: finish Grand Theft Auto V's rollout, start thinking about the next one, build Red Dead Redemption 2 with the bulk of the studio, then move that team onto full Grand Theft Auto 6 production in 2020.

Why six years of full production is the real number

Red Dead Redemption 2 took roughly eight years from early work to release. Grand Theft Auto V took about five. A 2020 production start for a 2026 release puts this game in the same territory as Red Dead Redemption 2 rather than in some unprecedented category.

What has changed is not the length so much as the cost per year. The scale described elsewhere this week, including over 600,000 animations and a dedicated Los Angeles team working only on non-player characters, is what six years of full production buys at 2026 prices.

The part that is hard to imagine

Rob Nelson has separately said the game has grown so large that nobody on the team knows the whole of it. A project where the co-head of the studio says that out loud is a project that has passed the point where any individual can hold it in their head.

That is either the most exciting thing about this game or the most worrying one, depending on your disposition, and nobody outside Rockstar will know which until November.