Project Americas was real, but it wasn’t the version of Grand Theft Auto 6 that Rockstar ultimately revealed. According to Bloomberg, the game’s original vision, dating as far back as 2015, would have let players explore “big swaths of land across both North and South America.” That sprawling concept shared a codename with one of the GTA rumor mill’s most outlandish claims.
The confirmation comes from reporter Jason Schreier, who visited Rockstar North’s Scotland office and interviewed the team about the game’s eight-year development journey. With GTA 6 nearly one month away, Rockstar has been sharing more in interviews about how the game works and how it came together. This detail reveals something else: what it stopped being.
Bloomberg’s report describes a studio that struggled to settle on a vision, contributing to the game’s two notorious delays. Exactly when Rockstar dropped the broader Americas concept isn’t clear. The first reveal in 2023 established Leonida as the setting, with Vice City at its center, rather than the continent-spanning adventure people had imagined.
That distinction matters. Confirming an early development concept doesn’t mean every supposed leak about it was accurate, or that its discarded locations will appear in the finished game.
Before the official reveal, though, there was plenty of room for speculation. Rumors were especially prevalent in 2020 and 2021, perhaps fueled by COVID-induced boredom. On Reddit, purported insiders supplied a steady stream of claims: seasonal map changes like Fortnite’s, cryptocurrency, and an appearance by Dr. Dre. Some sounded plausible. Others, in Polygon writer Giovanni Colantonio’s assessment, read like fan fiction that was setting players up for disappointment.
Project Americas was the claim he found most ridiculous. It gained traction in 2020 as a theory that GTA 6 would feature multiple cities spread across America, rather than the single-city setup fans associated with the series. Supposed map leaks pointed to Rockstar’s take on Cuba. People also scoured domain registrations for clues about which cities might appear. Colantonio describes a large part of the internet believing the theory for roughly a year.
Having covered that rumor cycle himself, Colantonio saw the increasingly grand claims as fans telling one another what they wanted to hear. The 2023 reveal initially seemed to vindicate his skepticism: Leonida was the setting, and Vice City was the destination. Bloomberg’s reporting has now prompted him to reconsider whether some of those rumors reflected actual plans rather than pure invention.
His revised interpretation is a possibility, not another confirmed leak. If Rockstar was testing different directions internally, conflicting rumors could have reflected those changes. Colantonio wonders whether Dr. Dre might once have been involved before another pivot, or could still appear in a cast he describes as already stacked. His reference to a hypothetical “15th direction pivot” is speculation, not a documented count of revisions.
The old Cuba claim raises a similar question for him: could GTA 6 send players to an island for part of its story, as Red Dead Redemption 2 did? Nothing in the Project Americas confirmation establishes that it will. An abandoned concept can explain where a rumor came from without validating its details.
Colantonio also admits to some nostalgia for the period when GTA 6 was still an internet legend. He recalls the elaborate theory that a Super Bowl advertisement featuring The Weeknd would reveal the game. To him, those sometimes entertaining conspiracies were a relatively harmless way to fill the information gap, particularly compared with Cyberleek’s more malicious antics involving threats of story and ending spoilers.
The source gives Nov. 19 as GTA 6’s arrival date. Colantonio jokes that GTA 7 speculation will begin on Nov. 20, invoking the familiar line, “Ah shit, here we go again.” The question for that next rumor cycle is whether a claim describes an actual plan inside Rockstar or something players will get to play.
