"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, and this time the interviews are with Rockstar's own leadership, not anonymous staff. It's 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 big moment is a phone call, and 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 that at the time. As the date got closer, Rockstar North decided it needed longer. The team went to Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, and she phoned Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick to push 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." She says he came round once the reasons were laid out, and she made the point that a lot of executives in his chair would've just 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. It's the same position he took at Take-Two's annual meeting in September, when a shareholder put the delays to him directly. This time, though, somebody who was on the other end of the phone has described what it sounded like when he heard.

Too many characters, not enough time

The leadership Bloomberg spoke to say there was no single disaster. There were a huge number of moving parts that didn't come together as fast as planned, and one of the central ones was people on screen: Rockstar didn't have the capacity to write and animate the number of characters the world needed.

That fits everything Rockstar's chosen to show since. The studio's own marketing has leaned on crowds and strangers more 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 filling 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 basically the whole company on GTA 6. Several senior figures left in that period, most prominently co-founder Dan Houser, who'd been the lead writer on most of the studio's games. Nobody replaced him as a single director. Head of development was shared between three people instead: 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 fits with our 2015 date

We reported in September that early work on GTA 6 began in 2015. Bloomberg's version, that the studio went over to it after Red Dead 2 in 2018, matches what Rob Nelson told TroisCouleurs: the majority of the team started on it once Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. Early work means a small team. Putting the whole company on it is something else, and the two dates describe both. An earlier version of our coverage gave 2020 as the start of full production, which no source supports, and we've corrected it.

No budget, and a promise about the next one

The feature doesn't give a budget figure, though it describes the game as very likely the most expensive ever made. It doesn't say whether the November date itself was ever 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 won't take eight years, because the engine, the tools and the team now exist. That's a promise about 2030-something, so it's one to remember then.