- Key Takeaway: GTA 6 head of development Aaron Garbut revealed in a Love Magazine interview that Rockstar developers traveled Florida alongside police officers and gang members for research into the culture behind Leonida and Vice City.
- The research began with a small team moving from Miami through surrounding towns, down through the Florida Keys to Key West, and also covering the Everglades.
- Garbut described some of the stories and locations the team encountered as genuinely terrifying, despite their guides being among the nicest people they’d met.
- Miami Beach approved a $4 million GTA 6 marketing deal — ads on beach chairs and umbrellas starting October 15 — while the Miami Heat will rebrand as the “Vice City Heat” for a November 18 game against the Milwaukee Bucks.
- Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz publicly opposed the use of publicly-owned facilities for GTA 6 marketing, but later clarified she had no issue with the NBA’s involvement.
- GTA 6 launches on November 19, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with Leonida’s map reportedly three times larger than Red Dead Redemption 2’s playable area.
With GTA 6 arriving on November 19, 2026, Rockstar Games is in full promotional mode — and the details coming out about how the team built Leonida and Vice City are genuinely fascinating. In a new interview with Love Magazine, Rockstar’s head of development Aaron Garbut pulled back the curtain on the research process behind GTA 6’s version of Florida, and it goes considerably further than photographing streets and noting landmarks.
Garbut revealed that developers traveled across Florida alongside both police officers and gang members, absorbing the real culture, stories, and environments that would eventually become the fictional state of Leonida.
How Rockstar’s Research Trips Actually Work
Every Rockstar game starts with research trips before a single asset is built, according to Garbut. For GTA 6, the process began with a small group making their way from Miami through surrounding towns, down through the Florida Keys and all the way to Key West. As the project expanded and more developers got involved, subsequent trips brought larger teams back to the region for deeper investigation.
Garbut travels with both a phone and a camera on these trips, recording everything he can — sights, people, interactions, stories. But the research went well beyond conventional location scouting. The team spent time with locals from radically different walks of life, including opposite ends of Florida’s law enforcement and criminal communities.
“We travel around with cops and with gang members,” Garbut said. “We do go in-depth, we hang with locals and we hear lots of stories and learn as much as we can.”
The result is a team that didn’t just photograph Miami — they absorbed its contradictions. Garbut acknowledged that some of what they encountered in those settings was unsettling, even if the people who guided them through were welcoming. “We experience the underside as well; although the people who showed us around were among the nicest we’ve met, the stories, the places, the details could be terrifying.”
The Everglades and Florida From the Air
The research wasn’t confined to streets and neighborhoods. The team also explored Florida’s landscape more broadly, including the Everglades — and at one point the developers apparently made local news during one of their research excursions, according to Garbut, who remarked with some amusement that “I think we made the local news that day.”
That depth of research feeds directly into what Rockstar is promising players: a Leonida that doesn’t just look like Florida from the outside but feels like it from the inside. The game world is described as satirizing 2020s American culture through the lens of social media and influencer behavior, law enforcement technology, conspiracy theories, and the broader “strange ways people react to events.” Rather than lifting specific viral real-world moments — which would date quickly given GTA 6’s development timeline — the team captured the texture and atmosphere underneath them.
Garbut also confirmed that the main story will not function as a guided tour of Leonida. Players following the narrative won’t see all of what the state has to offer, and the developers are actively encouraging people to go off-script and explore the world on their own terms. Whether that culture research translates into NPCs, ambient dialogue, side activities, or just the general atmosphere of walking through different parts of Vice City and the wider state remains to be seen — but the foundation is clearly there.
The Miami Marketing Machine — and the Sheriff Who Pushed Back
Rockstar’s connection to South Florida hasn’t been limited to research trips. The GTA 6 marketing campaign has planted the game’s branding directly into the real Miami, and not everyone has been happy about it.
The City of Miami Beach approved a marketing deal with Rockstar Games’ hired firm by a narrow 4-3 vote, with the campaign valued at approximately $4 million. The deal, which runs from October 15 through the end of 2026, keeps things deliberately low-key — GTA 6’s imagery will appear on beach chairs and umbrellas across the city, using the Roman numeral “VI” and “Vice City” branding rather than the full game name. The approach was specifically designed to be discreet.
Separately, the Miami Heat will rebrand as the “Vice City Heat” for a single-game promotion on November 18 — the night before launch — against the Milwaukee Bucks at the Kaseya Center. A giant banner on the arena’s exterior is part of the deal, making it one of the more visible pieces of the campaign.
Not everyone in Miami has rolled out the welcome mat. Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz made her opposition public, issuing a joint statement with Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez arguing that the county shouldn’t associate itself with a franchise built on fictional versions of the crimes her department deals with every day. Her statement was blunt: “Miami-Dade County is not Vice City.”
The sheriff’s position was specifically directed at the use of publicly-owned infrastructure — proposals involving Miami International Airport, Metromover train wraps, and other county-managed facilities. When the Miami Heat’s involvement was announced, her office clarified that her earlier comments were never about private businesses or the NBA, and that she had no objection to the basketball team’s promotional decision. The distinction is worth noting: the hardline opposition was about public resources endorsing the franchise, not about GTA 6 existing in Miami’s cultural sphere at all.
GTA 6 — What We Know Heading Into Launch
GTA 6 launches on November 19, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with no PC release date currently announced. The game follows dual protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and Leonida’s map is reportedly three times larger than Red Dead Redemption 2’s playable area — a staggering scale for a game that Rockstar has been building across years of development that reportedly more than doubled the studio’s worldwide team size since RDR2.
The research Garbut describes sounds like it went well beyond the standard approach for open-world games, and given what Rockstar has historically done with location-based authenticity — from San Andreas to Los Santos to the American frontier of Red Dead — there’s good reason to believe that time on the ground in Florida will show up in the final product in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
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