Rockstar Explored Florida with Gang Members and Police for GTA 6 Research

In a recent exclusive interview with Love Magazine ahead of GTA 6's launch next month, Rockstar Games offered a glimpse into their creative process for building immersive virtual worlds. While the interview largely centers on the love story between dual protagonists Jason and Lucia, it also reveals how the team immersed themselves in Florida's culture to craft the game's setting.

To capture the essence of Florida, Rockstar team members spent extensive time exploring Miami and its surrounding areas, embedding themselves in the local culture. These research trips begin with a small group scouting the most intriguing locations and stories, followed by larger teams on subsequent trips to delve deeper into the culture, narratives, and people.

"Every game we make starts with research trips. It's where we get to explore both the place and our ideas as a group," said head of development Aaron Garbut. "To begin, a small group of us spent some time traveling from Miami through some of the surrounding towns and through the Florida Keys down to Key West. This is one of the best parts of the entire project: a car full of friends, driving for days on end, talking about what we want to make and being immersed in the locations and our ideas."

Garbut documented everything with a camera and phone. During one outing, a few Rockstar developers spent the day flying low and fast over mangrove inlets in the Everglades, then ended the day hovering over a stadium where a live Beyoncé concert was taking place. "I think we made the local news that day," Garbut recalled.

"We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can. We travel around with cops and with gang members. Everyone is lovely. Some people are equally scary. We experience the underside as well; although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we've met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying. We try to build a world that is believable and varied, with depth, so that is the research we need.

"Miami itself is really those extremes — lovely people, incredible wealth, incredible poverty, excess, craziness, the hustle, and showing it all off. That's our research trips — experiencing those extremes so that we can bring them into our world, and it all finds its way into the game in surprising ways."

These surprising elements might appear in pedestrian dialogue, radio shows, or advertisements, which Rockstar treats as essential rather than secondary content. Every detail matters when creating a world players will explore for hundreds of hours.

Rockstar's approach to a modern-day GTA game deliberately avoids recreating real-world viral moments, as long development timelines can make such references feel dated — just ask Borderlands. Instead, GTA 6's satire focuses on modern culture, conspiracy theories, and "the strange ways people react to events."

Last week, the Miami Heat announced a special match where the team will wear GTA 6 uniforms in a themed arena. For more on GTA 6, check out IGN's extensive coverage, including our interview with Rockstar Games, our preview, and the first confirmed voice actor.