GTA 6 NEWS · BEHIND THE SCENES
Rockstar Rode With Cops and Gang Members to Build GTA 6’s Florida — and Made the Local News Doing It
We already knew Rockstar’s Florida field trips were legendary — the strip clubs and night rides with ex-cops made sure of that. But the new LOVE Magazine interview IGN picked up today takes the curtain behind the curain: head of development Aaron Garbut personally walked through how these trips actually work — from a car full of friends driving Miami to Key West, to riding around with cops and gang members, to a helicopter flight over a Beyoncé concert that ended up on local news. This is the deepest account of Rockstar’s research operation ever published, and it comes from the man who runs it.
What Happened: Garbut Explains the Research Machine
The mechanics are more structured than the folklore suggests. Trips start small: leads scout locations and stories first, and larger groups follow on subsequent visits to go deeper into “the culture, stories, and people.” Garbut calls research trips the foundation of every project: “Every game we make starts with research trips. It’s where to get to explore both the place and our ideas as a group. To begin, a small group of us spent some time traveling from Miami through some of the surrounding towns and through the Florida Keys down to Key West. This is one of the best parts of the entire project: a car full of friends, driving for days on end, talking about what we want to make and being immersed in the locations and our ideas.”
Notice what that roadmap actually is: Miami, the Keys, Key West — the exact geography of Leonida’s southern arc. In GTA 6 terms, that’s Vice City down through the Leonida Keys. The scouting route Rockstar’s leads drove for fun in a packed car is, functionally, the map they then went and built.
On later trips, Garbut documents everything: he “takes a camera and a phone and records everything that happens.” And then the line that launched a hundred headlines: “We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can. We travel around with cops and with gang members. Everyone is lovely. Some people are equally scary. We experience the underside as well; although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we’ve met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying. We try to build a world that is believable and varied, with depth, so that is the research we need.”
The Beyoncé Flyover (Yes, Really)
The interview’s best anecdote is airborne. During one shoot, a handful of Rockstar devs spent an entire day “flying low and fast over mangrove inlets in the Everglades” — then ended the day hovering over a stadium with a live Beyoncé concert playing. Garbut’s deadpan follow-up: “I think we made the local news that day.”
A team of game developers circling a Beyoncé concert in a helicopter, drawing TV news coverage, is the most GTA research story ever told — and it maps directly onto the game. The Everglades are Grassrivers, the mangrove inlets are the swampland between regions, and that low-and-fast aerial footage is precisely how you reference a state’s coastline for a map that aims to feel like real Florida. The same day the flyover happened, somewhere a Rockstar artist was probably already sketching.
How This Connects to the Game You’ll Play in November
The payoff quote is Garbut’s thesis on Florida itself: “Miami itself is really those extremes — lovely people, incredible wealth, incredible poverty, excess, craziness, the hustle, and showing it all off. That’s our research trips — experiencing those extremes so that we can bring them into our world, and it all finds its way into the game in surprising ways.”
“Surprising ways” is doing heavy lifting there. Per IGN’s read of the interview, those surprises include pedestrian dialogue and radio shows — content Rockstar says it does not treat as secondary. A story heard from a cop on a night ride becomes a line of NPC chatter; a detail clocked from a helicopter becomes a rooftop you’ll parachute onto. And it lines up with what the writing team said in the same interview cluster: there is no background in this game, just foreground you’re not paying attention to — a world where every errant conversation had a writer, because the person it came from was real.
It also explains the satire strategy we covered earlier this week: Rockstar deliberately avoids recreating real-world viral moments — long development timelines mean meme references date a game (ask Borderlands). Instead the targets are modern culture, conspiracy theories, and “the strange ways people react to events.” Research grounds the world; the writers keep it current-proof.
Worth zooming out on the timeline, too. The Game Informer feature revealed these trips have run for years — Humphries’ “we go and try to experience everything” list included night rides with ex-cops, strip clubs, nightclubs, beaches, the Everglades and the Keys. What LOVE adds is the structure underneath: the small-group scouting runs, the return visits “in greater numbers,” the constant documenting. This isn’t a studio that visits Florida; it’s a studio that rehearses it, over and over, until the state is muscle memory. And Garbut’s framing makes clear the affection runs both directions — the people who showed them around were “among the nicest we’ve met,” even when the stories they told were the terrifying kind. That warmth is exactly what separates Leonida from a theme-park version of Florida, and it’s the difference you feel when a world is about a place rather than merely set in one.
What This Means for GTA 6
Leonida is a documentary with a body count. Every region on the map — the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga — was walked, flown, or driven by the people who built it, with cops and gang members riding shotgun at various points. When you “visit Florida” in November, you’re visiting a decade of somebody’s field notes.
The research is the differentiator. Plenty of studios can render a city. Almost none send art directors up in helicopters over Beyoncé concerts, or commission days-long drives with the kind of guides Garbut describes. It’s why Vice City has always felt more inhabited than imitated — and why we’re confident the six regions of Leonida will feel like six real places rather than six biomes.
Forty-five days. All that research pays out November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Pre-order GTA 6 for PS5 on Amazon or lock in the Xbox Series X|S version here.
Somewhere in a Rockstar hard drive there is helicopter footage of a Beyoncé concert, taken for a video game about crime in Florida. That sentence is why this industry is worth paying attention to. See you in the Everglades.
Want GTA 6 news the second it drops? Join the Locals — free newsletter, no spam.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Related reading: Rockstar’s earlier Florida research reveal · The six regions of Leonida · GTA 6’s satire manifesto · The Key West map debate · Things to do while you wait