Bloomberg's GTA 6 making-of report recalls a two-hour side detour
Jason Schreier's Bloomberg feature on the making of GTA 6 recounts an internal review where one player spent two hours on crime instead of the story mission.
Rumour. An unverified leak or claim. Treat it with caution until Rockstar speaks.
Bloomberg has published a long feature by reporter Jason Schreier on how Grand Theft Auto VI was made, and one passage has quickly become a favourite with fans. An excerpt was shared in a GTAForums discussion thread opened on October 14. It describes an internal review session in which a person the excerpt names only as Hooker set off toward a story mission and then spent two hours doing everything except that mission.
Two hours, zero story missions
As the excerpt tells it, the detour began with a random NPC who started insulting Hooker. The exchange turned violent. Hooker then came across a store with nobody behind the counter, so he emptied the register. With police now chasing him, he got away, dumped his car and went looking for another one. The replacement turned out to be valuable, so he set off to sell it.
On the way he was nearly flattened by a car blasting music. Rather than shrug it off, he followed the car to a compound nearby, cased the place, found a stash of goods to steal and drove them to a fence. The fence then handed him a tip for yet another job.
By the end of all that, according to the report, two hours had gone by and Hooker was nowhere near the story mission he had been asked to look at. "I remember the sheer fun of it," he told Bloomberg. He recalled the team leaving the review feeling encouraged despite the doubts that come with that stage of development, and thinking: "If we stick to our guns on this, we have something really special."
Why this anecdote matters
Schreier has a long track record on Rockstar. In 2022 he reported for Bloomberg that the next GTA would have a Latina female lead, years before Rockstar formally introduced Lucia. A making-of feature from him carries weight, and this passage gets at something fans have wanted to know since the first trailer: whether Leonida's systems feed into each other on their own, or mostly sit between scripted missions.
If the excerpt is anything to go by, the developers were aiming for chain reactions. A provoked NPC, an unattended shop, a police response, car values, a stranger's loud car and a fence that hands out new leads all connect into one unplanned evening of crime. That lines up with earlier reports about how much freedom players will get, including an Edge feature saying the map opens up early for free exploration. The fence and its tips also hint at how side activity could feed into systems like the Criminal Profile.
What we still don't know
This article is based on the excerpt shared in the forum thread, not the full Bloomberg piece. The excerpt doesn't say when the review took place, what state the build was in, or exactly what Hooker's role was. Development builds often change a lot before release, so there's no guarantee every link in that chain survived into the final game in the same form. The excerpt also includes no comment from Rockstar or Take-Two on the report as a whole.
Players won't have to wait long to find out how much of that freedom made it through. GTA 6 is set to launch on November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and we'll be watching for the moment someone heads to their first mission and ends up at a fence instead.
