Rockstar Doubled in Size for GTA 6 and Hired Real Stylists, Racers and Street Artists

Rockstar Games has roughly twice as many employees now as it did when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. That’s the number to sit with. The studio had around 2,000 people in 2018. It’s at something like 4,000 today, and Grand Theft Auto 6 is the reason.

The detail came out of a cover story for Dazed, where Rockstar opened up about how the game got made. The most striking piece: a new Los Angeles office that’s “almost solely” dedicated to working on nothing but the game’s NPCs. An entire building. For the people you walk past.

That growth came partly through acquisitions, with new studios in Australia, India and the LA office mentioned above.

The stylist who got hired in 2023 and never left

Not everyone Rockstar brought on is a game developer. Miami-based stylist Jillian Carr came aboard to help build what the studio calls a “fashion ecosystem” that can capture the diversity in style, culture and class needed to give Vice City’s residents their own character.

“Vice City is built around vanity,” Carr said to the magazine. “Between social media, celebrity culture and a constant flow of tourists, appearances carry significant weight, and trend cycles turn over quickly.”

Consultants on a big game aren’t unusual. What’s different here is the arrangement. Carr and others like her are full-time Rockstar employees and have been for years. She was hired in 2023 and appears to be as much a part of the team’s regular operations as anyone else.

Racecar drivers and 50 muralists

The hiring spree went further. Rockstar brought in racecar drivers to help with vehicle handling, and 50 real street artists to design murals across the game’s map.

Fifty. Not a handful of commissioned pieces to dress up a few walls, but a roster of working artists putting paint on a fictional Florida.

What else Rockstar let slip

The studio also revealed new gameplay details, including how eating, working out and sleeping all affect your characters, plus much more beyond that.

And this is only the opening salvo. Rockstar will officially pull the veil off the game tomorrow in an extended look on Netflix, which is widely expected to give us a deep dive on gameplay.

Until then, you can chew on this: somewhere in Los Angeles, there’s an office full of people whose entire job is making sure the stranger on the corner looks like they have somewhere to be.