Hello, One Take Shrier here and today we're going to talk about Grand Theft Auto 6 again. But first, I just want to give a quick heads up to those of you out there. You know, I I don't show my books a ton on this YouTube channel. That'll change when my next one comes out in a couple years. But, uh, at least for now, I don't talk about them a lot, but I do want to give a heads up that, uh, Play Ice, The Rise, Fallen Future of Blizzard Entertainment, my most recent book, is on sale. The ebook version is on sale for just $4. So, if you want a cheap way to check out that book, go to your favorite digital store and check it out. Okay, let's talk about GTA 6. So, this week, as you might have seen, I published a big story about the development of Grand Theft Auto 6. I went to Rockstar. Um, I saw some of the game and I interviewed the top developers behind it and the head of publishing at Rockstar, talked about the culture, talked about the challenges that they faced along the way. It is the first time that they've been open about some of the dark periods that they faced during the development of this game and some of their attempts to kind of change their culture over the years, which I've been reporting upon for the last, I don't know, eight years since Red Dead 2 came out. And I wanted to talk today a little bit about the kind of the the the story behind the story, the behind the scenes behind how I wound up there, what I saw there. I'll talk a little bit about um the game itself and what I saw running there. And uh I'll talk a little bit about my thoughts for the game as we head into November 19th, which is the actual release date for this game. I saw some people, you know, it's funny when I did that story. Um, of course, uh not everybody wants to read 5,000 words, which I understand. So out there on Reddit and other sites, people take uh people make bullet points that are attempting to sum up the story, but clearly a bunch of people took or at least one person and it just spread took um AI Chachi PD and used it to make the bullet points, which is a problem because it inserted stuff that isn't there, including um something a line in these bullet points I saw that said something like um uh uh Rockstar believes November 19th is achievable, which led to a lot of confounded reactions. People were like, "Achievable? What?" Which of course the article said nothing like that. Achievable is not is not a word that has been used to describe that release date. That that release date is real. Um I'm a little fish facicious and like tongue and cheek about it because it's kind of like it's the video game industry. You never know until the game is actually in your hands. I believe Cyberpunk was once delayed like 3 weeks before it was supposed to come out. So you never know until you're actually playing the thing. But um but still uh it's this is this is real. This is a real real release date. All right, so let me tell you the story. So um little bit of backstory here. I've been writing about Rockstars games for a very long time since actually since I was at Wired, which was like 2009, 2010, something like that. Um was covering LA Noir and um uh uh what was it? I don't think I ever played Max Pain 3, but definitely GTA 5 when I was at Kotaku. So I've been covering them for a while. Um, and uh, around the time Red Dead 2 was slated to come out, I was doing some reporting on Rockstar's culture of crunch. And actually, it's funny, I had been a little bit of backstory here. So, I had been hearing from people about Rockstar just kind of putting its developers through really excessive periods of overtime. Markxar was known for making these huge games and it was also known for being a place where you had to like put in a lot of extra hours to um to to succeed there. That was just part of the culture and for a lot of people it was really brutal. It was like it led to a lot of just kind of destroyed personal lives and really rough times for a lot of people. And I had been hearing stories about that for a while. And then what happened was New York magazine published a story where Dan Howser um talked about working quote 100hour work weeks to finish the game and that led to some social media controversy and that led him to quickly putting out a statement saying oh that was only for 3 weeks and it was only the writing team. Um so I had already been working on the story and like talking to some current and former Rockstar employees about their own experiences with Crunch. And then this came out and that led a lot more people to come to me. Um, not just because really it wasn't even Dan Hower. Dan Hower is the co-founder of Rockstar and the lead writer until his departure in 2019, but it wasn't even like his 100 hour work week comments that led to people coming to me and saying, "Hey, I crunched on this game. I want to talk about it." It was actually his statement afterwards where it kind of they felt kind of trivialized and undermined. They were like, "Yeah, we did actually crunch." Like, nobody told me they worked 100 hour weeks. That that's that's pretty um wild, bonkers. But people told me, "Yeah, we were working 55, 60 hour weeks for long periods of time, especially at the end of production and sometimes for months we would be working those kinds of hours." And for Hower to be like, "No, it was just the writing team just for a short period of time kind of undermines and trivializes what we were actually going through. So ultimately I wound up speaking to around a hundred people and that was not just people that were reaching out to me under condition of anonymity because a lot of them did they didn't want to get in trouble um or ruin their careers potentially by speaking to me. Um Rockstar also when they found out I was working on the story I started talking to them I was like I would love to give you guys an opportunity to comment. Um, they invited me into their offices in New York City where I sat down with Jen Colby who's the head of publishing and she gave me some stats and she gave me her perspective which I included in this big story. They also did one of the most kind of strangest still one of the strangest things I've experienced in my career which is they had me sitting in this conference room in Rockstar's New York City office. And I mean to their credit they wanted me to talk to people but they did it in such a way that made it very difficult for me to trust what I was hearing which is um I was sitting in the room with the head of publishing and their head of PR and then we would have these zoom calls with like groups of employees from different studios all across Rockstar. So like there was one from Rockstar in San Diego. There was one from Rockstar North in Scotland. There was one from Rockstar in Massachusetts. And it would be these group calls and these people would just be kind of talking about their experiences and I didn't get the sense that they were lying or anything but um very different context I will say when I am on the phone with someone and they are just talking to me and they uh the head of publishing and uh head of PR for their company are not listening and they are not on a group call with other employees. So a little bit of a different kind of atmosphere than your standard uh conversation. It was very very strange. Anyway, all of that led to me doing this big story on Kotaku about Red Dead's culture of crunch. And I guess to sum it up, I would say that Red Dead 2 was really brutal for a lot of people. It was a really tough project for a lot of people. At the same time, it was also easier than previous project uh Rockstar projects have been, which I think speaks more to Rockstar's culture than it does to Red Dead 2, cuz this was a tough project for a lot of people, but it was like previous projects have been really brutal. um and talking to people who were there in like the 2000s, they had really really t tough experiences on some of the company's older games. Um, but most of all, I mean, I think that a large part of this uh conversation, and I promise I won't harp on this too much longer, but a large part of this conversation was like about the culture surrounding Crunch. Because I think that crunch is something that will always pop up when you're working on a big um ambitious, difficult project, especially in game development where it's really difficult to estimate an accurate schedule um ahead of time because you don't know how long some a lot of things are going to take. You don't know how long it's going to take before something feels fun. Um, and there's a reason that games like this I mean GTA 6 was delayed twice. Not because people um uh not because like people were faking release dates. Maybe the first time they kind of were, but like most of the time people just they set dates and they have projections, but like reality catches up at certain points and different parts of the production also. There are a lot of moving pieces, right? So there's like art and design and programming and a lot of different things will make progress at different speeds, right? So can wind up leading to delays being necessary. And a lot of times people try to make up for that with crunch. Or people find out like, hey, if I don't uh or people think to themselves, if I don't put in this extra time, my feature will be cut or my feature won't be as good as it could be, so I'm going to put in this extra time. Um, and I think that there's some nuance there. Like I mentioned in my last video, there's this kind of spectrum of crunch. And I think what is important um at a lot of these companies is uh uh getting rid of the culture of crunch. Getting rid of this kind of this almost unsaid belief or this unsaid law rule that within the studio you have to be working extra hours. And I'll give you a good example of that which is that at Rockstar in the past there was this mentality and I heard about this on Red Dead too. I mentioned this in my Kotakaco story. There was this mentality um that uh uh if Dan and Sam Hower, one of them is in the office or like some other top executive is in the office this weekend um or comes to town or whatever, you better be showing you better be there all hours of the day because they like to see butts and seats and that's what impresses them. And that's the type of thing that's like one small example of crunch culture where it feels like your company is built around this. Another example might be just scheduling in crunch, which some companies do and some producers do on their schedules. Anyway, it all culminated in the story and I did the story and then I had been following them for the kind of the years and months afterwards and I actually wrote a couple of stories in the interim years talking about how they had been working to try to improve that culture in various ways. One big way that they tried to improve it was offering extra PT PTO paytime off in lie of every extra crunch hour that you worked. Um I've talked to some people who were a little skeptical uh that even at the end of this project that they'll actually get all those PTO days. Um so we'll see how much they live up to that how many people if people can actually take like a month off after development. We'll see. But um that is what they promised among other things. They did a bunch of things. They got rid of a lot of managers who they saw as problematic. They made a lot of big cultural improvements. Um but still during this period I mean I would say my conversations with Rockstar were pretty limited. Every time I ran one of those stories, I would always reach out to their PR. Um, and I believe every time I just kind of got a cool but cordial response just being like, "Yeah, we don't have anything to comment on." Um, and so I would say my relationship with Rockstar over those years was icy at best. Um, that said, they weren't launching any new games, so there wasn't anything for me to go and just like start pitching them or talking to them about. But still, um, I think that that Kotaku article and my reporting about them, which got a little adversarial, um, I think did not exactly lead to us being BFFs. Um, and then I think I really, uh, uh, certainly did not, uh, make BFFs with them. Certainly did not uh, uh, get friendship rings out of a story that I ran for Bloomberg at the end of 2023. I believe this was November of 2023 when I reported that they were planning on announcing Grand Theft Auto 6 and releasing the first trailer. That was the night before they would then announce that um they were doing that. Um I actually saw some some rumors on the internet that like uh Sam Hower was apparently so mad that he thought about delaying the announcement just despite me for reporting that. Um which uh I I don't know if that's true. I'm a little skeptical just because it was tied to a take 2 earnings call. So that's not the type of thing that you can just kind of move. But still, it is what it is. And again, I I just don't I I think that they were mad about that. Um so cut to maybe a couple years later, 2025 or so, early 2026, they actually Rexar actually changed PR people and I've been talking to their new head of PR um since let's say spring of this year. I had been talking to them about um this idea of like doing a big story about Grand Theft Auto 6's development and not just about like um a preview of the game the way that I knew they were going and having some other people come in and do, but also just talking about like what it's been like with the ups and downs, the challenges, how Rockstar has changed, how they've doubled in size over the last eight years. Um and it took a lot of back and forth. I did a lot of pitching. They were really they were I I pitched a bunch of different versions of what the story could look like, which by the way is a common thing. I'm often talking to companies and saying, "Hey, this is a story I would love to tell." Um sometimes I'll be working on a story where um people who work at a company are com are talking to me about like something that went wrong or like work conditions. And so I will go to the company involved and say, "Hey, I'm working on the story. just want to make sure you guys have a chance to comment or you guys have a chance to offer your um executives perspectives and give me an interview about this. Um so that sort of thing is happening all the time. I'm just kind of constantly in a mode where I'm talking to different companies and pitching their stories and whatnot. And this one was a big one. I mean Bloomberg was very interested in GTA 6 obviously going to be one of the biggest games of all time. And so um they were interested in Business Week, our magazine, our print magazine. They were particularly interested if it would be a cover. And so a lot of back and forth, I would say couple of months of back and forth. I pitched them on what I would need. I was like, I would like to come to Scotland. I would like to interview some of the top developers. Eventually, we got to a yes. This was like 2 weeks beforehand, 3 weeks beforehand. I had been planning a trip to Japan and like uh like for it was around Tokyo Game Show week in mid-Sepptemeber. And the timing of this worked in such a way that I was like, I would have to fly home from Japan to New York. Um, and then 24 hours after that, get back on a plane and go back across the Pacific Ocean to Scotland. Um, sorry, back across the Atlantic Ocean to Scotland for these interviews. So, I knew I was going to be a wreck, which I was. I was sick for like 2 weeks afterwards. Still kind of recovering from that trip. Um, but yeah, but it worked out. Uh, flew into Adam, spent a couple of days there. Um flew in on a Monday. Spent a day kind of walking around and exploring the city a little bit. Really cool city, really quaint city. Um small, a lot of kind of historic um landmarks. Uh it's funny. You have this this one little area that kind of feels like a proper city. There's this like huge bookstore. Spent a bunch of time in this like three floor bookstore that was super cool. Um and then you walk over a couple of blocks and you see all these cobblestones and castles and churches. Um which is very European thing. There are a lot of European cities that just have that kind of blend of like the modern modern city on this side and then up you walk in one alley and suddenly it feels like you've traveled back in time to to the uh 1500s which was pretty cool. Um just about the opposite of Miami as as close to polar opposite of Miami as you can get. Um and then on that Tuesday I spent the day at Rockstar North. Um I I told them my Bloomer has kind of strict policies about like we're not going to sign NDAs or anything like that, but they were open and they were welcome. Um they let me uh come in and I sat in uh the office of Rob Nelson who is um one of the three heads of development and we had kind of an in-n-out of people coming in and out as we all sat and chatted. We had lunch over there and we talked about all sorts of things and I was um I would say uh uh I was it was surprising how willing they were to be open about all sorts of things and they were pretty candid about a lot of things as you can see in the story including some of the dark times and some of the struggles that they went through on this game. Um it's funny I I talk about this in my uh column that goes up today on Bloomberg which is kind of a complimentary piece to this the big story. Um, but uh what really struck me about hearing about the development of Grand Theft Auto 6 is that uh how similar it is to other video game productions that I've heard about. Like took them a long time to find the fun. Um they ran into technical issues, they ran into communication issues and production issues and scaling issues. Um the it was very difficult for everybody to see the vision. There was a lot of iteration involved. the trailers were guiding lights for them and that helped everybody see like, okay, this is what the game is going to look like. This is what the final product could potentially look like. Um, just all these other things that I just have heard from so many other game developers. The only difference is that Rockstar has 10 times as much money as other game developers. And so they can uh solve a lot of these problems by just throwing money at them rather than having to, I don't know, scope down. Although they did have to scope down, too, and had to cut some stuff down over the course of this time. And um I think in the post-mortems on this game, I'm sure they will have a lot of interesting conversations about things they could have done better, including I think having um more of a vision that coalesed earlier on. Although I I challenged their heads of development. So for example, um one of the structures that was new about this game is that they had three heads of development um instead of kind of a singular aur. Not that they always not that they ever really had that, but maybe Dan Hower was was kind of close to it. he was more of a writing um director, but still I mean they had more of a singular vision. They also had a different design director who was no longer there. But anyway, they had this three headed structure and two people who are kind of lower level. Um it felt uh like there were too many cooks in the kitchen. It felt like there was conflicting visions um indecision. It took a lot long time for people to figure out what the game was going to look like, etc., etc. Um I challenged these guys, Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker, and Aaron Garbid, the three heads. Um I challenged them about it. Uh and they were pretty defensive. They essentially were like no I mean we didn't really feel that way. It might have seemed like that way from below but we felt like we were kind of on the same page. A lot of this their in their telling a lot of this was happening during co when everything was a disaster anyway and they were trying to make some of these decisions while everyone was working from home and trying to adjust to a pandemic. So from their perspective it felt differently. I will be very curious to see how this is all discussed once the game comes out and they all kind of look back on production and try to figure out how it could have been done better and how they can move forward um in better ways. But anyway, that's all kind of a little little bit of inside baseball um there, which by the way, I mean, credit to Rockstar for opening up the doors and allowing a reporter this this kind of level of um transparency into how they are doing things and also from getting some things on the record. And I mean, one of the things that I think is valuable about a story like this, I mean, first and foremost, it's giving readers access to all this information and this behind-the-scenes look, but also I think if you work at a company like Rockstar, it can actually be valuable to be able to point to these on there statements um from developers and executives and be like, well, this is what you said. You said this in print. It's right here. For example, Jen Colby, the head of publishing, I was talking to her about some of the union issues. um which will be a subject for another issue is another video is and and more reporting on on Bloomberg is their um their battle with the union right now um which is still ongoing in Scottish in a Scottish tribunal and Scottish court um over them firing uh uh about 34 employees for what they say was leaking information and for what the union says was union busting. Um, but I asked them about their current union effort because after they fired those employees, which was last year, they um employees at Rockstar kept trying to unionize and they asked for voluntary rec recognition earlier this year over the summer. And so Jen Colby, the head of publishing, told me that since then they've been having what she called good conversations, productive conversations every week. And uh she said, quote, "If if they if it's all up to the staff, if they want a union, they'll have a union." um which I think is a helpful thing to have on the record if you are a member of that staff uh because you can certainly point to that um as a as a point of conversation. Um so yeah, and then I I I want to talk a little bit about the game itself because I'm sure many of you are wondering about that um about some of the details that I saw. So um while I was in his office, Rob Nelson picked up the controller for a bit. Um, it's funny. At the beginning of our conversation, he thought he was going to be playing and talking, but he found it so difficult to like talk about development while he was playing that we decided to to to just talk most of the time. But I did want to see some of the game, especially some of the stuff that he was saying was like the most challenging to get in there, including um Jason and Lucia, the two main characters, doing stuff together in free form. And so the idea of this is that so in the last GTA game, in GTA 5, there were three protagonists, Michael, Trevor, and Franklin. and you could switch between them at any time. And in story missions, you would kind of they would work together and you might switch between them to like get different perspectives as you were going. Um, which was an interesting feature. Uh, they also all hated each other and were just kind of exhausting to be around, which is a little bit different than this time around where you have a criminal couple um, who actually seemed to like each other's company. Um, but in that game when you were doing your kind of free form world exploring sandbox stuff, you could only play as one at a time and you wouldn't interact with the other two while you were playing that one. You could switch between them, but you wouldn't interact with them. Um, in this one, you play well when you're playing as Jason or Lucia, you can call the other person and have them come and keep you company while you're just doing sandbox stuff, non-story stuff, just anything in the world. And so they told me that took a lot of work, a lot of scripting, a lot of like custom animations and custom just kind of programming and it took a lot to get that in there. So I wanted to see that in action. And what Nelson showed me, he wouldn't let me. I I asked if I could play uh and they would not let me. Uh they had a marketing um Mark told me that uh uh uh I could not pick up the controller sadly. I wanted to uh sneak it while they were like in the bathroom or something, but could not could not make that happen. So he picked it up and he started playing. Um, and basically, uh, I'll walk you through exactly what I saw, which is that, so he's playing as Jason. Um, Jason calls up Lucia is like, "Hey, you, uh, you doing anything?" She's like, "No, I'll come over." So, uh, you wait a few minutes, she texts on my way. Um, she comes over, you can press a button as Jason and like give her a kiss. Hello. And then you get like a little heart on your screen, like a little romance, romance boost or whatever. Um, and by the way, they say, they've said this in previews before, so you might know this already, but like this is all optional stuff. You don't have to play around with their romance at all, but it's there's kind of an an a built-in relationship system that they uh that they keep track of over time. So, uh so you so and then, uh what I saw was they uh um Rob play pressed a button to have Jason and Lucia hold hands and they walk through the park and they started this conversation that was really interesting. It was really interesting banter. They were talking about Lucia's mom and some spoilery stuff that they asked me not to spoil so I won't. Um just story stuff. Um, and uh, uh, then after that, after this walk and this conversation, he was like, "Let's go check out, let's go see what we can rob." And so he took me to a few different places, they went to the he went to the gym. Um, Jason would do squats and Lucia ran to the treadmill and then Jason when he was done like went to go and pick up Lucia and then they headed out together. Um, if Jason grabs a scooter, like hijacks a someone's scooter, Lucia will find a nearby scooter or if not that, she'll like look for another vehicle nearby. There's a lot of just kind of like subtle interactions between the two of them. At one point, he took me to he took Jason and Lucia to a bank and like cased it out. Was like, "Should we rob this?" No. Too many security guards. But if you're with your partner, you have different options for like how to rob something than you do if it's if you're just by yourself. Um he told me, and he said this in other previews, but just to reiterate, he told me that like money matters more in this game than it did in previous games. There was always something funny about in Red Dead 2, this big conversation point, this big narrative driving point being like, "Ah, we don't have any money. We need to go do one last score to get some money." Well, you in the free world could be just like racking up millions of dollars. And that kind of having to reconcile that was always kind of funny. Um, in this, it sounds like money is going to be more more important and more valuable and feel less like uh this thing you can just kind of accumulate and watch the numbers go up. But, I mean, who knows? We'll see what happens in the real game. Um, and then uh at one point he like took Jason and Lucia to kind of work together to steal from this back room of a gas station without they like disarmed the alarm so they didn't uh wake up any security or anything like that. Then at one point he was going to take them to get a haircut when Jason like accidentally got into a brawl with some like pedestrians and that led to someone calling the cops and then the cops started going after us and he was like, "Oh my god, I did not mean to do this but here we can check out the new wanted system." The wanted system um is very different than previous than GTA 5. Um it's now it's a little more elaborate. There are multiple zones of wanted. Um and also um the police will know if you are like together or single among other things. They'll also know like if you're wearing a mask or if they might know your face and might know what your clothes you're wearing, stuff like that. Um, but the together a single thing is most interesting because then you can choose like when you're fleeing to like leave Lucia behind potentially or maybe you both split up and one of you takes one car and one of you takes another and maybe that'll get the cops off your back. So it's that kind of systemic stuff that has them working together in the world which is an interesting concept and for me personally um the sandbox stuff um I could kind of I don't know I'll I'll see how much I enjoy that. What actually intrigues me most is the story of this game and seeing the kind of the conversations and the banter between Jason and Lucia who I think make for a pretty cool um duo hero duo. Um, and I'm very curious to see how that plays out in the main game because the conversation I saw them have while they were walking in the park was interesting enough that I would just like keep exploring the world as the two of them just to see more stuff like that play out cuz it offered some some extra backstory that I don't know if that just pops up randomly or if you get that in some other way, but I enjoyed it. Um, so yeah. Um, before I end this video, I just want to share a couple of personal thoughts, which is, um, I I remember enjoying GTA V when I played through it back when it came out, but it was exhausting. It was draining. Uh, watching those three main characters uh, just kind of yell at each other um, was was a little much. I actually I just I recently replayed the first hour or so of GTA 5 and it really just starts off with just Franklin and Lamar just like insulting each other and yelling at each other and it's just kind of it's so nihilistic and sour that it's a little it's a little tough to play these days, at least for me. Um I think it was something of its era that um a little less enjoyable these days. And I was way more into Red Dead 2, which I think has one of the greatest stories told in a video game and just has plays around with so many interesting themes, has so many good characters, has got so many good moments, like when you're um at the party scenes, which might be the best part of Red Dead 2 when you're at these camp parties and you can just go around interacting with all the different characters. Arthur Morgan, who I like many people thought was going to be this just generic like criminal protagonist based on the trailers, turns out to be one of the most interesting and sympathetic and vivid characters in video game history. So that game I think had a lot to it and I really enjoyed it. Could could could do without a lot of the realistic immersive sim stuff. I was always way more into the actual story. um and was so sad once like some of those characters uh uh died along the way and as like you could just watch everything just kind of falling apart. It was it was really cool. A really cool story that I enjoyed and I've always been hoping that GTA 6 would be a lot more like Red Dead 2 than GTA 5, which does indeed seem to be the case, most notably with these two main characters. And so the thing I'm most excited about again could do without all the the the heavy realism and immersion and and all these systems um that are ultimately just kind of coming down to like a lot of violence in the world. Like that'll be interesting to play around with. But to me what is most intriguing is the story of Jason and Lucia. This criminal couple heavily inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. How they interact over the course of this story, where their journey takes them. um given uh I'm sure it'll be a very happy ending just like Bonnie and Clyde. Um but yeah, um that's what I'm most curious about and looking forward to actually seeing. And of course, I'll talk more about it on Bloomberg and on here um once I have actually checked out the game and gotten a chance to see through the story, but um I'm feeling pretty optimistic based on what I saw. Um, one other quick thing I'll say, not to sound a little prudish here. So, apologies if this is a little prudish, but um, I do think there is something to the fact that it looks so realistic and you just have to spend so much time killing people. I I don't know how that's ultimately going to feel when I play the game, but having this level of graphical fidelity and just having to spend a lot of your time in this game shooting people in the face, I I am very I don't know, a little reticent, a little apprehensive, but I will see how it ultimately feels for me to uh be playing that. I don't know if anyone else out there feels the same way or if this is just me being uh being all uh I don't know uh uh Mod Flanders about it. So, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Um, when games are this realistic, uh, it's it could be a little icky, but I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. Um, all right. Lots more to talk about when it comes to GTA in the coming weeks. We are now about, uh, a month ahead of launch, so there will be lots to talk about there. Um, but next week, uh, I'll be here to talk about a different game that I really enjoyed. Um, well, I I guess I won't say it cuz uh technically I'm still under embargo, but uh there's a game coming out next week that I really enjoyed and I'm excited to talk to you all more about it. So, have a good weekend. I'll see you then.