GTA 6’s Most Unbelievable Rumor Confirmed Actually Real

Published Oct 14, 2026, 10:53 AM EDT Giovanni Colantonio is a video game journalist who has covered the industry for two decades. He was formerly a senior editor at Digital Trends and has contributed to publications like Inverse, Fanbyte, and Hard Drive. His specialty is criticism, as he’s focused on a modern approach to video game reviews that’s focused on the nuances of how interactivity communicates to players. He is currently a member of the New York Video Game Critics Circle. After years of debunked rumors, it turns out Project Americas was once real Image: Rockstar Games With Grand Theft Auto 6 nearly one month away, Rockstar is finally ready to talk about a game that has been wrapped in secrecy. A steady stream of interviews has told us more about how the game works, and more importantly, how it came to be. The latest example of that comes by way of Bloomberg, where reporter Jason Schreier visited Rockstar North’s Scotland office and spoke to the team about its eight-year development journey. But the juiciest detail in that report doesn’t detail what GTA 6 is; it’s what it isn’t that stands out most. The original vision for the open-world game, as far back as 2015, would have players not exploring just one city but “big swaths of land across both North and South America.” That project was codenamed “Project Americas” — and those two words might be enough to give you goosebumps if you were terminally online in 2020. Before GTA 6 was properly revealed in 2023, fans were desperate for any information about the game. Perhaps fueled by COVID-induced boredom, 2020 and 2021 were a hotbed for rumors. Leaks became currency on sites like Reddit, where so-called insiders seemed to have a hot new detail every day. One week, it was that the game would feature seasonal map changes, a la Fortnite. Next, it was that it would feature cryptocurrency. Every once and while, someone would chime in and claim Dr. Dre would be in the game. Some rumors sounded plausible, while others read like absurd fan fiction from people who were setting themselves up for a colossal disappointment. The most ridiculous rumor? Project Americas. What is Project Americas? The rumor, which caught on like wildfire in 2020, was that GTA 6 was going to be set in multiple cities spread across America, bucking the established trend in the series of playing out in one city per game. Suddenly, supposed leakers came out of the woodwork to add fuel to the theory. We started seeing regular “map leaks,” which suggested that the game would send players to Rockstar’s take on Cuba. People began investigating domain registrations to figure out which cities the game would feature. For a good year, a large part of the internet believed that Project Americas was real. As someone who was tasked with covering the GTA rumor mill at the time, it all sounded absurd. The obsessive way that fans were generating new rumors, which got exponentially more grand by the day, felt like a clear case of players telling each other what they wanted to hear. I felt vindicated when we got our first look at GTA 6 in 2023, which confirmed that the game would focus on one setting, Leonida. Finally, we could put years of imaginative rumors to bed. Vice City, here we come. Image: Rockstar Games Well, egg on my face! Bloomberg’s report confirms that the Project Americas rumors didn’t come out of thin air. That actually was the vision for the game at some point, though it’s not clear when exactly those plans shifted. In detailing GTA 6’s arduous development cycle, the report notes that Rockstar had trouble nailing down a vision for the game, something that led to its two notorious delays. The revelation has me looking back at the Reddit leak era in a new light. Maybe some of those leaks were legitimate; if it felt like people were throwing rumors against the wall, perhaps it was because that’s what Rockstar was doing at the time too. Maybe Dr. Dre was supposed to be involved with the game at some point, and that changed during a 15th direction pivot behind the scenes. Maybe he is in the game, and we don’t know it yet! (The cast revealed so far is pretty stacked.) I’m certainly looking back at that old Cuba rumor today and wondering if GTA 6 will pull a Red Dead Redemption 2 and send you to an island for part of the story. Free sign-up Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later. Sign up free Free. Unsubscribe anytime. I hate to admit it, but the Project Americas confirmation has left me a little nostalgic for a time when GTA 6 was only an internet legend. As ridiculous as it was, there was something fun about watching conspiracy theorists twist themselves into knots as they tried to prove that GTA 6 would get an ad at the Super Bowl featuring The Weeknd. It felt like a harmless, sometimes entertaining way to fill the void — especially compared to the comparatively malicious antics of Cyberleek. Once Nov. 19 comes around, we’ll finally put that long history to bed. The good news for sentimental fans? You can count on that cycle beginning anew once GTA 7 hype begins on Nov. 20. As a great man once said: “Ah shit, here we go again.”