when did they start developing gta 6

Rockstar began early work on GTA 6 shortly after Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018, with full development ramping up “in earnest” around 2020 according to Take-Two’s CEO and a former Rockstar artist.

Quick Scoop: GTA 6 Development Start

• A former Rockstar artist, David O’Reilly, has said he worked on GTA 6 from 2018 to 2023, indicating that active development started right after Red Dead Redemption 2 wrapped in 2018.

• Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has stated that GTA 6 development began “in earnest” in 2020, implying that 2018–2019 were more pre-production and early concept phases, with full-scale production really kicking off in 2020.

• With the game targeting a 2026 release, that puts the core development cycle at roughly six years of full production (2020–2026), or about eight years if you count from the initial post-RDR2 work in 2018.

TL;DR: They started working on GTA 6 after RDR2 in 2018, but serious, large-scale development is described as starting around 2020.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.