If the video game industry had something like an annual high school yearbook, the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI would garner a lot of superlatives: Most Expensive Game Ever Made, Biggest Development Team of All Time, Most Likely to Shock TV Newscasters, Best Use of Hand-Holding While Committing Crimes, Most Varied Body Types, Angriest Pedestrians, Most Realistic Depiction of Sweat, Game That Required the Most “Research” Trips to Miami Beach.
To create the sprawling world of GTA VI, staff at development studio Rockstar Games went on a series of excursions to Miami, the real metropolis on which this game’s fictional Vice City is based. They rode with police to criminal hot spots, craned out of helicopters to snap aerial shots and weaved through crowds of scantily clad dancers at the hottest nightclubs in town — all so they could evaluate the lighting. Designing a club for a typical video game might mean generating a few nonplayable characters in different-colored shirts, says top artist Aaron Garbut. In GTA VI, though, it means animating and scripting each individual patron, creating drinks, adding music, crafting lighting, matching the music to that lighting and composing all the other “layers and layers and layers of detail” that make a virtual club feel as authentic as possible.
