Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6 is so large and detailed that, according to a new report, no single employee knows everything that is in it. The claim comes from Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, who said Rockstar head of development Aaron Garbut used an old Red Dead Redemption 2 anecdote to show how the studio works.
That anecdote involved the game’s infamous animated horse testicles. Schreier said Garbut brought up the detail while Schreier was visiting Rockstar North for his Bloomberg report on GTA 6. The point was that the feature was not ordered from the top down. Instead, it appears to have come from someone, or a group of people, working on the game on their own initiative.
As Schreier put it in a YouTube video, the horse testicles were “not something that was on some big list of features to make.” He said they were the result of “a person on their own, autonomously” deciding to add them because it seemed like a cool detail and there was time to do it.
Schreier said Garbut’s broader point was that GTA 6 is too big for one person to carry the whole game in their head. “There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head,” he said Garbut told him.
The horse testicles became one of Red Dead Redemption 2’s most discussed details because they react to temperature, contracting in cold weather and expanding again in the warmth. In Schreier’s account, that sort of detail is exactly the kind of thing that can emerge when Rockstar staff have room to add ideas without waiting for every decision to come from a creative lead.
Schreier said that autonomy matters because it helps explain how Rockstar can keep producing unexpected features. In his view, the same freedom that produced the horse-testicle animation could also lead to similarly odd or elaborate details in GTA 6. The report does not say what those might be, but it does tie the studio’s internal process to the kind of small, memorable touches that have followed Rockstar games for years.
Roads, art teams and a bigger production machine
Schreier’s video also included several other details he said he learned during his trip to Rockstar North. One was that roads in GTA 6 are “significantly narrower” than in GTA 5. The idea is to make traffic feel more present and to force players to deal with tighter streets, which fits the game’s push toward more realism.
He also said some artists have been working on GTA 6 for 11 years. By comparison, GTA 5 had “five or six” people in its art production team. Schreier said GTA 6 has 65 people in art production now. That difference suggests how much the project has expanded compared with Rockstar’s earlier work.
Rockstar itself has also grown since Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018. Eurogamer said the company has roughly doubled in size, rising from 2,441 employees to 4,711 across 12 offices. Those numbers help explain how a single game can become large enough that one employee cannot know every system, feature and detail at once.
The same pattern appears in other parts of the studio’s design work. Schreier said the contextual “hold left trigger” interaction system introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2 also came from someone working on the game independently: Phil Hooker, now Rockstar’s director of technology. According to Schreier, it was not a feature handed down by one of the game’s creative leads.
He also said Rockstar tried many experiments before settling back on GTA’s radial menu. The team explored multiple replacements, but in the end returned to the familiar menu structure.
GTA 6’s long development path keeps surfacing new details
The report lands in the middle of an already busy run-up to GTA 6’s release. GAMER2GO previously reported on claims that the team tested “a million” weapon wheel alternatives before circling back to the final setup, and Schreier’s comments about the radial menu match that picture of repeated experimentation. That earlier story showed Rockstar continuing to test ideas until one fit the game.
Other GAMER2GO coverage has tracked speculation about preorder strength, the launch trailer’s hints about Jason’s military past, and reports that GTA 6 was originally meant to develop alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. The site has also covered claims that the PC version could arrive in early 2027, as well as the separate leak stories tied to Cyberleek and other accounts. The trailer report focused on Jason, while the earlier development story pointed to the game’s long gestation.
Those leaks matter here because Schreier’s report is arguing that GTA 6 has already reached a scale where individual developers can still add personal touches, even while the project is under intense scrutiny. The same openness that allows a tiny animation detail to survive can also make a large game harder to contain inside a single design document or a single chain of command.
GTA 6 is due out on 19 November, a month from now. The launch has not been quiet, either: Rockstar North is currently facing an employment tribunal in Scotland over the alleged unjust firings of 31 employees, and a series of gameplay footage leaks has already shown parts of the game outside Rockstar’s control.
Schreier’s report leaves Rockstar with a familiar balance to manage. The studio is operating at a size that requires huge teams, but some of the details people remember most may still come from one developer noticing an opportunity and deciding to build it.
this is the first gta 6 thing that actually sounds believable to me. a game that huge needs people spotting little details on their own, not one guy signing off on every tree and traffic lane.