Every big Rockstar game has a version that did not get made. For GTA 6, the Bloomberg cover feature published October 14, 2026 finally put that version on record, and it was substantially bigger than the game shipping on November 19.

The 2015 Miami trip and the codename

Per the feature, work began in 2015 with a research trip to Miami. The project carried the internal codename Project Americas, and the plan was to span both North and South America.

That codename has circulated in leak and insider circles for years. This is the first time it has appeared in on-record reporting built on interviews with Rockstar's own development leads, which moves it from rumour to established production history.

The scope was later reduced to Vice City and its surrounding areas, which is to say the state of Leonida and nothing beyond it.

What "North and South America" probably meant

Be careful here, because the feature does not describe the design. It says the project was planned to span the two continents. It does not say there were two playable maps, or a flight system between them, or which South American city was involved.

What is worth noting is that this lines up with older reporting, also from Jason Schreier, that an earlier GTA 6 concept involved multiple cities and four protagonists, with a structure that moved players between locations. The shipped game has two protagonists in one state. Our piece on that narrowing is why GTA 6 has two protagonists and not four.

The through line across both accounts is the same: GTA 6 was conceived as a game about movement across a hemisphere and became a game about depth inside one region.

Why it shrank: RDR2 took the people

The feature names the cause, and it is not a creative retreat.

Development lead Rob Nelson told Bloomberg that senior leadership and a large share of staff were pulled onto Red Dead Redemption 2, which pushed GTA 6 back by several years. After RDR2 shipped in October 2018, Rockstar changed how it works: most of the workforce now goes on one major project at a time.

So the sequence reads: start in 2015 with a two-continent plan, lose leadership and staff to RDR2 for roughly three years, come back to a project whose ambition no longer matches its remaining schedule, and cut. Our development history and delay timeline cover the dates.

The scope that replaced it

Cutting a continent did not make GTA 6 small. The confirmed shape of what replaced Project Americas:

That is the trade Rockstar made: fewer places, far more inside each one. The same feature describes developers arguing over whether buying a drink should mean opening a fridge and paying at a checkout, which is the clearest possible illustration of where the budget went instead of to a second continent. Our map size breakdown has the comparison numbers.

The NPC problem was a scope problem too

The density choice had a bill attached. The feature reports that at one point the team realised it did not have the people to create and animate the NPCs the game required, and Rockstar opened an additional studio in Los Angeles devoted to that work.

A two-continent game would have had this problem squared. Reading the cut back to Leonida as purely a loss misses that the shipped scope was already beyond what the studio's 2015 headcount could populate. See the Los Angeles NPC studio.

What this does not mean

Three things the Project Americas reveal is not evidence for.

It is not evidence of future DLC. Cut scope from 2015 is not shelved content waiting to ship. No GTA 6 expansion has been announced in any form.

It is not evidence that Liberty City or any second city is in the game. No second major city has ever been named for GTA 6, and the canonical named-location list is entirely inside Leonida.

It is not evidence the 2022 leak build shows the cut game. That footage was from a 2015-era development build and is routinely misread. Our leak retrospective covers what it actually showed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was GTA 6 really going to include South America?

Bloomberg reports the project was planned to span North and South America under the codename Project Americas. The design detail, including which locations, is not described, so treat anything more specific as speculation.

Could the cut regions come back as DLC?

There is no announcement, no hint and no precedent for Rockstar shipping cut pre-production scope as paid content. Former Rockstar producer John Ricchio has previously noted that cut content from an older engine generation generally has to be rebuilt from scratch rather than reused.

Did the RDR2 delay cause the GTA 6 delays?

Partly. Rob Nelson's account is that RDR2 pulled leadership and staff and pushed GTA 6 back by several years. The 2025-to-2026 delays reported in the same feature have separate, later causes, mainly production tasks and NPC capacity.

Is Leonida bigger or smaller than the original plan?

Smaller in geographic ambition, far denser in content. The shipped map is roughly 2.4 to 2.7 times GTA V's with 700-plus interiors, which is the opposite trade from a continent-spanning map.

The Bottom Line

Project Americas is the most interesting thing in the Bloomberg feature that does not change a single fact about the game you will play. GTA 6 started in 2015 as a hemisphere, lost three years to Red Dead Redemption 2, and came back as one state built to a level of detail that still required a new studio just to fill it with people. The cut was not a failure of nerve. It was the decision that made the density possible.

Sources: VGTimes, Bloomberg, Insider Gaming