GTA VI began as "Project Americas" before Rockstar scaled it back to Miami, Bloomberg feature says

GTA VI started life with a much bigger map plan. Insider Gaming reports that Rockstar told Bloomberg, in a feature on the making of the game, that the project was codenamed "Project Americas" and was first meant to cover large areas of North and South America. The scope was later cut back to Miami and the area around it, which became the state of Leonida.

According to the same report, co-studio head Rob Nelson took a team to Miami on a research trip in 2015. Work on GTA VI first ran alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but that stopped when Red Dead needed more people and attention, and Insider Gaming says this pushed GTA VI back by several years. Nelson framed the one-game-at-a-time approach as worth it for the payoff in the finished game.

In a second write-up of the Bloomberg interview, Insider Gaming reports that head of development Phil Hooker said the game is never fully settled, that the team has changed things within the last few months, and that the delays came from parts of the game not coming together in the planned time rather than from any single dramatic problem.

This follows our earlier brief on the same feature, Rockstar says its next game should come faster than GTA VI.

Why it matters. It is a rare account from Rockstar itself of how the game's setting and schedule changed, and it explains part of the long wait since Red Dead Redemption 2.

What is still unknown. The report gives no dates for when the scope was cut or when work on GTA VI resumed in full. We have not read the Bloomberg feature itself, which did not load for us; this brief relies on Insider Gaming's write-ups.