Leonida started with road trips. Rob Nelson, head of development at Rockstar North, told TroisCouleurs that once the studio picks a setting, a handful of people go there first, drive around on their own and take a ton of pictures. A larger group follows and meets consultants who take them all over the place. For GTA 6 the place was Florida and Miami.
A research team in Miami
Over the last decade several groups of Rockstar employees have visited Miami and the area around it, and a dedicated research team is based in the city, Dazed reports. Rupert Humphries, Rockstar’s senior vice president of narrative, says most of the game’s characters come out of that research: “We will meet with ex-criminals, law enforcement, club promoters, gun dealers and anyone notorious or influential who’ll take our calls.” What they hear is then checked against books and journalism.
Music shaped the cast too. Humphries names Miami bass and newer Miami artists such as Kodak Black and Sexyy Red, house parties in Overtown, clubs like Booby Trap on the River and South Beach venues where a bottle costs thousands of dollars. Boobie Ike and Dre’Quan Priest take the player through that scene, and the rise of Real Dimez can be followed through viral posts on the game’s social media.
Players can expect their own versions of Florida Man too, the meme of alligator wrangling and drunken antics, Dazed writes. Game writer Michael Wiafe says the team tried to approach the culture with an open mind and real curiosity: “It’s easy to go in with a cynical view and say, ‘Well that’s weird, put it in the game,’ but we couldn’t just stop there.”
A map that bends reality
Nelson calls the map a warped version of reality. Rockstar chooses which parts of Florida to keep, such as the Everglades and the towns outside Miami, and puts them roughly where they are in the real world. The writers then look for characters who can believably take the player through each place, from the swamps to a drug deal in a tower block raided by police to glitzy nightclubs. Nelson calls those characters tour guides.
Rupert Humphries then writes the story as a page and a half, and the team works out which missions and set pieces move the player from one part of the map to the next. The game is split into chapters, which helps plan how it moves.
Murals, cars and pedestrians
The team has more than doubled in size since Red Dead Redemption 2, according to Dazed, and one office in Los Angeles works almost entirely on pedestrians. More than 50 real street artists designed murals for places like Stockyard, Vice City’s version of Miami’s Wynwood. The team that tunes vehicle handling is made up of race-car drivers.
Jamie-Lee Lloyd, senior art director for characters, told Dazed that Rockstar built new tools and pipelines for the most detailed and varied population it has made. People change from area to area, from Little Cuba to the wilderness of Mount Kalaga.
Fashion and brands
Miami stylist Jillian Carr has worked with Rockstar since 2023 on what Dazed calls the game’s fashion ecosystem. “Vice City is built around vanity,” she says: social media, celebrity culture and tourists keep trends turning over fast.
Stu Petri, vice president of 2D and UI design, oversees the brands, shops and campaigns of the game and wants each brand to feel like it serves a purpose in Leonida rather than as a one-off joke. Dazed’s photo captions name some of the clothing labels: Stock 305, Nola, Ferruccio Tucci, This/That and Blagueurs, with jewellery by Caliber.
How the people of Leonida behave is in our article on map size and NPCs.
