GTA 6 was made by an army of thousands of game developers who had to be coordinated by Rockstar Games, but some of the studio's best work is the result of individuals using the independence afforded to them to enact the kind of chaotic goodness that would make a tabletop dungeon master smirk. Case in point: horse scrotums in Red Dead Redemption 2.
The buried details of GTA 6's mammoth production line are examined in a new video from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who paused to share some information from a recent Rockstar visit that couldn't fit into a prior written report.
Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut looks at the scope and granularity that Rockstar has to balance. "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head," he says.
Schreier, seemingly sharing his own thoughts and no longer quoting Garbut, adds, "Grand Theft Auto 6 is a humongous game, like Rockstar's previous games, and I imagine that not even the top developers of this company know every single thing that's in the game."
This is important context because it directly connects to something that Garbut singles out: the kind of unhinged perfectionism and attention to detail that gets you video game horses with testicles that convincingly shrink based on the temperature.
Herein lies the thin but magical boundary between disorganized development and meaningful autonomy. It's not that the studio heads, discipline leads, direct reports, and overarching producers at Rockstar don't know what's in GTA 6, or that designers are regularly going rogue with no oversight. All of those roles exist precisely because no one person can know and be accountable for everything in this game. But under that structured network, there's still space for designers, artists, and others to have agency and make individual contributions in their corner.
"Garbut actually brought this up," Schreier says of the famous Red Dead 2 horses. "That was not something that was on some big list of features to make. It was not something that an art director told an artist. 'All right, we got to get those horse testicles in here. Better put in nights and weekends so you can get these horse testicles in here.' That was something that people or a person, on their own, autonomously, decided, 'I'm going to do this because I think it's a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it.'"
Games like GTA 6 are partly the result of a lot of little things done well many times over within, and in service of, broader creative frameworks. Allowing space for surprises to manifest is how a lot of the magic happens in some of the most beloved games of all time, and this highlights one way that mismanaged or unhealthy development cycles actively hurt games (on top of, more importantly, people).
Great ideas that might've been found or implemented may never happen because people don't have the space, or the headspace, for them. If simply getting a game shipped is a buzzer-beating nightmare, refining and indulging in it gets that much harder. (Red Dead Redemption 2's development was notoriously filled with crunch periods, though some employees publicly pushed back on crunch accusations in 2018.)
We're still talking about the horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 because they reflect that game's extreme commitment to authenticity, zoology, and wonderfully unnecessary content. If those horse testicles were less realistic, nobody would care. But, demonstrably, the work of whoever is tragically not listed as Testicle Designer in the game's credits did improve the game and people's perception of it. Because after you find one of those little surprises, you start to look for more details, more fingerprints from individual developers making their mark despite being one of hundreds or thousands. The AAA games that actually justify their excess are full of stuff like this, and it sounds like GTA 6 will be too.
