Rockstar Games has revealed the original codename for Grand Theft Auto 6 was Project Americas, and that its intention was for the game to cover large areas of land in both the north of the country and the south.

The information comes from a wide-ranging interview with Rockstar on Bloomberg, which charted the beginnings of the GTA 6 project as well as the notable moments since: delays, game leaks, trailer releases, and more.

Bloomberg heard that Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson took a group of staff to Miami in 2015 for the game’s first research trip, and that Project Americas – as the game was then known – “aimed to feature big swaths of land across both North and South America”, before being scaled down to Miami and its surrounding areas. The original idea was to develop the game alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but as the western project grew in scope and ambition, Project Americas was pushed back several years.

But lots changed after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar would nearly double in size, for starters – moving from 2,441 employees to 4,711 across 12 offices, the article noted. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who’d written many of the previous GTA games, also left the company, prompting promotions for Nelson, Aaron Garbut, and Phil Hooker, who stepped into head of development roles.

By 2019, Rockstar had the skeleton of GTA 6 and the dual-protagonist hook of Jason and Lucia living their crime fantasy together, but the more granular details and mechanical intricacies of the game took longer, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, forcing people to work from home. “Trying to keep a team together through that is really challenging,” Nelson said.

Red Dead Redemption 2 also painted Rockstar as a company working with extreme levels of crunch – something Tom Phillips revealed in an investigation for Eurogamer. Rockstar acknowledged this in the Bloomberg interview, with Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing, stating it was “a real moment for Rockstar to look at itself”.

“We all looked at each other and said, ‘We’re not doing it again like this,'” she added. “It’s not been perfect, but it’s certainly better than Red Dead 2 was. Anytime I say we haven’t crunched, someone is going to say, ‘I did.’ And I don’t want to get into arguments with individual teams or individual people. But I think we did things differently, and I’m proud of that.”

Bloomberg reportedly spoke to “dozens” of Rockstar employees who “mostly expressed positive sentiment” regarding what Kolbe said, acknowledging improvements in areas such as crunch and removing managers who were abusive or tough to work with. However, Rockstar is currently embroiled in an employment tribunal in Scotland after unceremoniously firing 34 employees – 31 of them from its Rockstar North office – for what it alleged was gross misconduct but the fired employees called union-busting. We’ve been covering the tribunal’s hearings as they’ve happened. It’s expected to conclude at the end of the week.

As GTA 6 began to take shape, Rockstar suffered one of its biggest setbacks ever, as a phishing attack gained access to the company’s Slack in 2022 and leaked unfinished footage of the game. Aaron Garbut said in response: “It feels like somebody’s wading through your dirty washing. It’s like they’re inside your head. You see your early work out there. Nobody’s ever supposed to see that. It’s really weirdly invasive. And so it’s quite hard to deal with on an emotional level.”

As development progressed, it became clear Rockstar needed more time to finish the game. GTA 6’s first trailer, aired in 2023, promised the game would be released in 2025, but Rockstar would move this date to May 2026 to allow more time. Then Rockstar realised it wouldn’t be able to finish the game in time for that date either. Kolbe recalled phoning Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar’s owner Take-Two, to tell him the news.

“I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,'” Kolbe recalled. “But once we talked through why, he got it. And I think we are really lucky that he is as reasonable as he is, because a lot of people would say, ‘You’d just better figure out how to ship it.’ And we have been really, really lucky that we have not found ourselves in that place, because that happens to a lot of teams, and we’ve all played those games. It’s not great.”

Rockstar did not comment on the ongoing leaks of GTA 6 footage by the group or persons known as Cyberleek during the interview. The article closed with Rockstar vowing its next release wouldn’t take another eight years because “the engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly”, Phil Hooker said. Garbut added: “We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project. But now it’s done, we’re not going to rip it apart.”

GTA 6 is now finally due to release 19th November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, with a PC version reportedly due Q1 next year.