In a game as big as Grand Theft Auto V, it’s clear that a normal sized team wouldn’t have been able to make the game in the time frame they had, and as Leslie Benzies, President of Rockstar North, told Develop, it was “probably more, much more” than 1,000 people:
And that’s because of the size of the thing, we are modelling at such a minute detail. Once upon a time the car models have four moving parts. Now there are 15 alone in a car’s retractable roof. The detail is ten, twenty times greater than GTA IV, so it takes ten, twenty times more people.
We’ve been blessed with more power on these machines, so we continually have to push it – plus these guys are freaks. When they see a convertible’s roof moving back, the artist is excited by it, and that’s the kind of people we like to have working here. Isn’t that how all the great things on the planet exist, because someone thought something was cool?
With Rockstar North boasting a team of just 360 people, they got to that 1,000+ mark by using every Rockstar studio because “that’s the way we work now – everyone works on GTA, or Red Dead, and so on, then we move on to the next thing.” Andy Semple, Studio Director at Rockstar North, then added, “There is a broad range of skills at the company. Rockstar is a very connected company. That’s probably different to other studios or publishers. No part of the game is being worked on that other teams don’t know about.”
If GTA V used 1,000 developers, how many do you think they’ll need for Grand Theft Auto VI? Let us know in the comments below.
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