Rockstar Met Ex-Criminals And Gun Dealers To Build Vice City

Rockstar has pulled the curtain back on how it built Leonida, and the answer is roughly a decade of fieldwork. In its Dazed cover feature the studio laid out the research behind GTA 6, and it is far more literal than most people assumed.

They went and met the people

Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative, said the majority of the game characters come out of research that includes meeting real people who call the state home. That means ex-criminals, law enforcement, club promoters, gun dealers and, as he put it, anyone notorious or influential who will take their call.

The method is old fashioned. Hang around, get a feel for the place, listen to the stories, then cross-reference all of it against books and journalism until you work out which characters will actually bring the city to life.

A team living in Miami

This was not one research trip. Groups of Rockstar staff have visited Miami and the surrounding areas over the last decade, and there is a dedicated research team embedded in the city.

Jamie-Lee Lloyd, senior art director for characters, said that firsthand context is what let the team understand the visual markers and nuances that define the identities they wanted to represent, before filtering them through the GTA lens.

Game writer Michael Wiafe was blunt about the risk. The easy version is to look at Florida, decide something is weird and put it in the game. Rockstar wanted a sense of discovery instead of repeating cliches players have already seen a hundred times online.

The numbers behind it

• The Rockstar team has more than doubled in size since Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018.
• One office in Los Angeles works almost solely on in-game pedestrians.
• More than fifty real street artists were brought in to design murals in areas like Vice City Stockyard, which is based on Wynwood in Miami.
• The team that handles vehicle handling is made up of actual race-car drivers.

The music got the same treatment

Humphries said the team dug into Miami music specifically, from Miami bass through to more recent artists like Kodak Black and Sexyy Red. They were also interested in how the scene splits across the city: house parties in Overtown, clubs like Booby Trap on the River, and the high-end South Beach rooms where a bottle runs into the thousands. They needed characters who could carry players through all of those worlds.

That research shows up in the cast. Boobie Ike runs a private empire including the Jack of Hearts strip club and a music studio, overseen by the young and opportunistic Dre Quan Priest. Rising duo Real Dimez have a career you can follow through viral in-game social posts, which mirrors the shift towards female artists in the real industry since GTA V.

Why it matters

The scale of GTA 6 was never really in doubt. What Rockstar is arguing here is that the detail underneath it is not procedural filler. Rob Nelson pointed to Florida and Miami having one of the most diverse and interesting populations in the world as part of why the series circled back to Vice City at all.

Whether that holds up over the ten years or more people will spend in Leonida is the real test. On the evidence of this feature, Rockstar has thought about it harder than anyone expected.

Source: Dazed autumn 2026 issue, published 26 August 2026, featuring interviews with Rupert Humphries, Jamie-Lee Lloyd, Michael Wiafe and Rob Nelson at Rockstar Games.