Rockstar runs an office in Los Angeles that works almost only on GTA 6 pedestrians

The most repeated GTA 6 number of the last two weeks, more than 600,000 animations, is not the story. How Rockstar got there is. The Dazed cover story of August 26, 2026 and the New York Times feature of the 27th, the two magazine channels around the Extended Look, describe a production built around the people you are not supposed to notice.

The animation figure has been on this site since the showing. What was missing was who said it and what sits behind it. Both are now on the record.

An office for pedestrians

Dazed, on Rockstar’s structure:

It has offices around the world, with one branch in LA dedicated almost solely to the world of in-game pedestrians (NPCs).

Coverage of the New York Times feature describes the same group as a team of writers, directors and producers assembled around non-player characters. GamesRadar, reading that feature, adds that Rockstar has more than doubled in size since Red Dead Redemption 2. That last figure is the outlet’s framing, not a number Rockstar published, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

The quote that explains the animation count belongs to Aaron Garbut, co-head of Rockstar North:

Every room in the game, somebody thought about this. Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table.

The same reporting has him saying the team art-directed each individual character. Against roughly 55,000 animations in GTA 5 and 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6’s claimed 600,000 stops looking like a marketing number and starts looking like a headcount problem Rockstar solved by hiring.

The parts of Vice City that were made by people who live there

The same feature carries the research, which is the part nobody else is running.

More than 50 real street artists were brought in to design murals, in places such as Vice City’s Stockyard, which is based on Wynwood in Miami.
Jillian Carr, a Miami stylist, has worked with Rockstar since 2023 on how the city dresses. “Vice City is built around vanity,” she told Dazed. “Between social media, celebrity culture and a constant flow of tourists, appearances carry significant weight.”
Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative, on where the writing comes from: “We will meet with ex-criminals, law enforcement, club promoters, gun dealers and anyone notorious or influential who’ll take our calls.”
Populations are designed per area rather than reused across the state, with Little Cuba and Mount Kalaga National Park given as the two examples.

What all of it is for is on the NPC page, including the six things the crowd now does that it did not do in GTA 5.

Two answers to how long this has taken

The Dazed piece opens with a framing that got quoted as fact all week:

It’s been 13 years since Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V. And it’s been roughly the same amount of time since work began on its sequel, Grand Theft Auto VI.

That is not what Take-Two has told investors. On its Q4 FY2025 earnings call in May 2025, the publisher said Grand Theft Auto VI began development in earnest in 2020, after the success of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Version	Start	Where it comes from
Thirteen years	roughly 2013	Dazed’s own framing in the cover story
Six years	2020	Take-Two, on an earnings call, saying development began in earnest

Both can be true, and the gap between them is the difference between a project existing on paper and a project having a studio pointed at it. Rockstar shipped Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, and one team cannot be at full production on two games at once. Treat “13 years in development” as the lifecycle, not the production schedule, and be careful with anyone quoting it as the second thing.

Rockstar runs an office in Los Angeles that works almost only on GTA 6 pedestrians

An office for pedestrians

The parts of Vice City that were made by people who live there

Two answers to how long this has taken

Sources

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