Rockstar Rode With Cops and Gang Members Across Florida to Build GTA 6

Rockstar built Leonida by driving it first. Developers spent years on research trips across Florida , riding with police officers in some towns and with gang members in others, flying helicopters low over the Everglades, talking to anyone who had a story worth stealing.

That detail comes from Aaron Garbut, co-studio head at Rockstar North and the man who has run the look of these games since the first 3D Grand Theft Auto. Speaking to LOVE Magazine in a feature published this week, Garbut laid out how the studio turns a real state into a fictional one. The method is less glamorous and more obsessive than most people assume.

The trip that started it

Rockstar does not begin with a map. It begins with a car.

Garbut described an early research run where a small group drove out of Miami, worked through the surrounding towns, and kept going down through the Florida Keys until they hit Key West. They recorded locations as they went and argued about what could survive translation into a game. The first group was deliberately small. As the project grew, so did the number of people making the trip.

This is the part that explains why the regions in GTA 6 feel like specific places rather than themed zones. Leonida's confirmed regions , Vice City, the Leonida Keys, Grass Rivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga , track the real geography of a drive like that one. You leave the city, the towns get smaller and stranger, the water gets closer, and eventually the road runs out.

"We travel around with cops and with gang members"

The quote everyone is pulling from the interview is the blunt one.

"We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can," Garbut said. "We travel around with cops and with gang members."

Both halves of that sentence matter. Rockstar is not describing a ride-along program with a police department's media office. It is describing a studio that went looking for the same streets from two opposite directions, on the theory that neither side gives you the whole picture on its own.

Garbut was careful about how he characterized the people who showed them around. The phrasing is worth reading closely rather than paraphrasing.

"We experience the underside as well," he said. "Although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we've met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying."

That is a specific claim about a specific tension: the guides were generous, the material was not. It is also a quiet answer to a question GTA has faced for twenty-five years , whether the studio knows anything real about the worlds it satirizes, or whether it is working from other people's movies.

The helicopter, the mangroves, and the Beyoncé concert

The best story in the interview is also the funniest.

On one trip, the team took a helicopter over the Everglades, flying low across the mangrove inlets to get the texture of the water and vegetation from the air. Then they drifted toward a stadium where a Beyoncé concert was in progress, and hovered.

"I think we made the local news that day," Garbut said.

It is a throwaway line, but it tells you what the aerial work was for. Grass Rivers , the Everglades analogue in Leonida , is the kind of environment that is almost impossible to fake from reference photos. Sawgrass, mangrove channels, and shallow water all read wrong unless you have seen how they break up from a few hundred feet. You cannot get that from Google Earth.

Why Miami, specifically

Garbut's explanation of what drew Rockstar to south Florida is the most revealing thing in the piece. It is a thesis about the setting, not a fact about it.

"Miami really lives off these extremes," he said. "Fantastic people, wealth, extreme poverty, excess, madness, the hustle of survival, and the ostentation of it all."

Read that list and you have the pitch for the entire game. Jason and Lucia are not wealthy. They are operating inside a place where wealth is permanently visible and permanently out of reach , the oldest engine in the series and the reason Vice City keeps getting revisited. The research trips were not about collecting palm trees. They were about collecting the gap between the two Miamis.

Garbut framed the goal in production terms too: "We try to build a world that is believable and varied, with depth, so that is the research we need."

That sentence is doing quiet work. Believable and varied are not the same ambition, and games usually sacrifice one for the other. A varied world is easy to build badly , six biomes that look like six different games. A believable one usually means narrowing the palette. Doing both is the expensive option, and it is the one that justifies years of field trips.

This was not a solo interview

The LOVE Magazine feature is broader than the research-trip angle that has traveled furthest. It brings in Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson, Senior VP of Narrative Rupert Humphries, VP of Art Michael Kane, Writing Director James Horton, and writers Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern and Alexa D'Agostino.

A few things from the wider piece that connect directly to the fieldwork:

• Raul Bautista is the older mentor who brings Jason and Lucia into heist work. He carries what the studio describes as a knowing Miami-cool , the character who already has the local knowledge the protagonists lack. He is, functionally, the in-game version of the people who showed the developers around.
• Jason has an army background and arrives at crime through circumstance rather than ambition. The studio calls him the brake.
• Lucia grew up in Liberty City and is the engine of the pair. Rockstar is openly positioning her alongside Arthur Morgan and Niko Bellic, and says the actor shaped the character substantially.
• NPC dialogue is written by a dedicated pedestrian-dialogue team in Los Angeles, with advertising and comedy writers in New York, Los Angeles and London. The stated philosophy: "There is no 'background' in this game; there's just foreground that you're not paying attention to right now."

That last line is the same idea as the research trips, pointed at a different problem. If every passerby is the main character of their own story, somebody has to have met enough real people to write them. Rockstar's claims about the NPC system make more sense alongside a team that spent years collecting voices in the field.

What it actually tells you about the game

Be careful what you extrapolate here. None of this is a gameplay promise. Rockstar describing its research process is not the same as Rockstar describing a feature, and nothing Garbut said guarantees that any particular street, person or story made it into the final build.

What it does tell you is where the studio spent its money and its years, and that is genuinely informative this close to launch. A team that flies helicopters over mangroves to get the water right is not optimizing for the cheapest possible open world. It also lines up with what the studio has been showing publicly , the regional variety in the Netflix extended look and the environmental detail in the Game Informer cover story are the visible output of exactly this process.

GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026. The Florida those developers drove through is already there. In six weeks you get to see how much of it survived.