After years of leaks and anticipation, it finally happened: Rockstar released gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most expensive video game in history. And boy does it look the part. Vice City shimmers with sweat, grit, and personality. Every scene is almost too detail-rich, a feast for the eyes that threatens to induce sensory overload. But what really stood out to me were the characters—and not just soon-to-be household names like Jason and Lucia. Every NPC, whether in a crowd or cutscene, moves with an incredible degree of verisimilitude. They appear human.
This, Rockstar boasted in a breathless New York Times feature about the GTA VI Netflix gameplay preview, is all handmade—a titanic achievement.
To make this world feel more believable, Rockstar built a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles that focused solely on creating more realized NPCs. Rather than use procedural generation to algorithmically mix and match body parts and clothes, the developers went for a bespoke approach.
“We art-directed each individual one of them,” said Garbut, who with Nelson also leads development for Rockstar Games.
Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar said, has well over 600,000 animations, compared with 55,000 animations in Grand Theft Auto V and 300,000 animations in Red Dead Redemption 2. Garbut emphasized the new game’s human-made craft.
“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Garbut said. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”
After a week of big Gamescom announcements accompanied by AI disclosures—a concentrated gut punch of implicit “AI is inevitable, don’t try to resist” messaging—this is a gulp of fresh air. Human hands crafted GTA VI, Rockstar at least seems to be saying (though these days, you never truly know), and more importantly, human minds put thought into every inch of it. That’s the good shit. That’s why we play games and experience art: to see the world through other people’s eyes, to understand how and why they live.
GTA VI represents the apotheosis of a certain kind of art: what happens when an enormous group of best-in-class artists are given near-infinite resources and, if not an infinite amount of time, then at least more than most usually get on a commercial project. This, it turns out, is what people can produce when working, in lockstep, with a singular purpose. Coordinated to a degree that few others in history ever have been. They can build something that is—at least, at first 27-minute glimpse—awe-inspiring.
But if Rockstar were being honest, it’d replace the star in its logo with an asterisk, because there’s always one looming over its games. The lead-up to Red Dead Redemption 2’s 2018 release, especially, was characterized not just by horse testicles, but by reports of a culture of brutal crunch—one that forced reviewers to reckon with the human toll exacted by gargantuan virtual worlds littered with painterly details.
At the time, former Kotaku staffer and current Triple Click/Strong Songs podcaster Kirk Hamilton wrote:
Play Red Dead Redemption 2 for just a few minutes, and the fruits of that labor will be immediately apparent. This wonderful, unusual game was clearly a titanic logistical undertaking. Every cutscene, every railroad bridge, every interior, every wandering non-player-character has been polished to a degree previously only seen in more limited, linear games. If Naughty Dog’s relatively constrained Uncharted 4 required sustained, intense crunch to complete, what must it have taken to make a game a hundred times that size, but with the same level of detail? As critic Chris Dahlen once put it while ruminating on how much easily missable, painstakingly sculpted work is included in the average big-budget game, “That’s some fall of the Roman Empire stuff right there.”
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It is human nature to pursue greatness, even when that pursuit brings destruction. It is also human nature to pursue achievement as an end unto itself. Red Dead Redemption 2 is in some ways emblematic of those pursuits, and of their hollowness. The game is saying that progress is a cancer and that humanity poisons all that it touches, but it was forged at the apex of human progress. Its gee-whiz technical virtuosity has a built-in expiration date, and in ten years’ time, the cracks in its facades will be much more apparent. At unimaginable cost and with unsustainable effort, it establishes a new high-water mark that will perpetuate the entertainment industry’s relentless pursuit of more, accelerating a technological arms race that can only end at an inevitable, unfathomable breaking point.
But there is a pulse pumping through this techno-artistic marvel. This game has heart; the kind of heart that is difficult to pin down but impossible to deny. It is a wonderful story about terrible people, and a vivacious, tremendously sad tribute to nature itself. There is so much beauty and joy in this expensive, exhausting thing. Somehow that makes it even more perfect—a breathtaking eulogy for a ruined world, created by, about, and for a society that ruined it.
Eight years later, Rockstar is on the verge of one-upping itself. But once again, that achievement might come at too high a cost. Despite reports in 2020 that Rockstar had cleaned up its act both in terms of 60-hour work weeks and a pervasive frattiness enabled by leadership, more recent times have suggested that it still doesn’t value its people so much as what it can squeeze out of them. In 2024, the company announced a five-day-per-week return-to-office policy that proved immensely unpopular with employees who’d finally managed to balance work and life under Rockstar’s figurative roof. This was met with large-scale pushback, as well as concerns about workers with disabilities and backsliding on crunch. Rockstar, however, refused to budge—in part as a preemptive countermeasure against leaks on the scale of what happened in 2022. We now know how that story ends.
Then, last year, Rockstar abruptly fired over 30 employees involved in a push to unionize their workplace for allegedly “discussing confidential information in a public forum” when—according to the Independent Workers’ Union Of Great Britain (IWGB)—they were actually communicating in a private union Discord. Protests followed. Fired workers, in conjunction with IWGB, are currently in the process of pursuing legal action against Rockstar, with a final hearing set for next month. UK-based Rockstar workers formally announced their union earlier this year, but Rockstar has yet to officially recognize it. Meanwhile, in July of this year, Game Developer reported that Rockstar has been ignoring pay inequity, mandating crunch, and weaponizing bonuses.
Despite all this, unionized workers have asked fans not to boycott GTA VI, instead requesting that they help monetarily support fired workers in their legal battle.
“We poured years of our lives into helping build this game,” they wrote in a statement earlier this month. “We don't want you to boycott it. We want you to help us fight for justice.”
It’s tempting to believe that a production on the scale of GTA VI naturally leaves a trail of cracked whips and broken backs in its wake—that if people aren’t worked to the bone, they won’t produce something truly excellent. But in the past, Rockstar workers have disputed that, as have those at other studios with histories of crunch that made serious efforts to reform, like CD Projekt Red. Great games wind up in our hands despite labor abuses and burnt-out workers, not because of them.
Rockstar can’t have it both ways. If the company is going to hold itself up as a paragon of care and craft, then it must also treat the people responsible with the care they deserve. Anything else is rank hypocrisy—a failure no matter how many billions of dollars GTA VI makes.
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Nathan Grayson
