Rockstar Rode With Florida Cops and Gang Members While Researching GTA 6

With just 44 days to go until Grand Theft Auto VI launches, Rockstar Games is finally talking about how it built Leonida — and the research sounds as extreme as the game it produced. Rockstar's head of development, Aaron Garbut, has revealed that the studio spent years criss-crossing Florida with everyone from police officers to gang members, collecting the stories and locations that became the bones of GTA 6's fictional state.

Garbut made the comments in an interview with LOVE Magazine, published ahead of the game's November 19 release. He explained that Rockstar begins each game the same way: with research trips, before gradually expanding the number of developers involved in the project. For GTA 6, a small group started in Miami and traveled through the surrounding towns and down through the Florida Keys to Key West, recording real locations and working out how each could be translated into the game's world.

Then came the part that raised eyebrows. "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."

Garbut described some of the people Rockstar encountered as "equally scary," and said the stories and locations they were shown revealed a darker side of the area. "The people who showed us around were among the nicest we've met," he added, "the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying."

The trips went beyond road travel. The development team also flew over the Everglades and even flew over a stadium during a concert, mapping the landscape from above — the kind of geography that fans have long suspected will fill the vast rural stretches between GTA 6's cities.

Reports of the trips surfaced on October 5, first reported by Dexerto, with additional coverage noting that the researchers' encounters included Florida locals from strip clubs as well as law enforcement and gang members.

The approach is vintage Rockstar. The studio has always grounded its satire in on-the-ground research — the team behind Red Dead Redemption 2 famously studied the American frontier the same way — and the Florida trips explain why early previews have described Leonida as feeling lived-in rather than merely drawn.

The revelations continue a week of unusually open commentary from Rockstar. The same LOVE Magazine issue carrying Garbut's interview has already produced a string of confirmed details: new screenshots and artwork of Lucia and Jason, the studio's deliberate decision to keep real-world politics out of the game's satire, and a look at how the writing team built the game's ambient "background noise."

That openness won't last forever. With a month and a half until launch, Rockstar is shifting into marketing mode: creator care packages are landing with streamers, a real-world Vice City marketing takeover in Miami Beach starts October 15, and the game itself — set for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S — is on track for what the industry expects to be the biggest entertainment launch in history.

GTA 6 NewsWire is an independent fan news site, not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.

Sources: Dexerto, The Source