The line that has been making the rounds in the games press has an ex-cop in the passenger seat and a strip club somewhere along the route. Rupert Humphries, Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, told Game Informer how the team studied the Florida that inspires Leonida: “We go and try to experience everything… from riding around areas at night with ex-cops, to going to strip clubs and nightclubs,” as Dork reproduces the quote. The list goes on: beach, Everglades, Keys “and beyond.”

The passage comes from the cover story in issue 382 of the magazine, the same package that brought the 12 new screenshots and the weather and wildlife material we already covered in Game Informer reveals the cover and in Leonida's advanced weather and wildlife. The field-research part only became a headline later, between September 30 and October 1, when sites like Aroged and Journal du Geek went after the most eye-catching detail of the interview.

What the team did on the ground

Each outlet we opened cuts the interview differently, and putting the pieces together gives a fuller picture than any of them alone:

  • Years of trips. Dork and Mobidevices describe travel over several years, paid for by Rockstar, to South Florida.
  • Nights with ex-cops. The night rides show up in every source, always alongside bars, nightclubs and strip clubs.
  • Nature. Beaches, the Everglades and the Keys. Journal du Geek also mentions alligator swamps.
  • People, not just scenery. According to Mobidevices, the studio said it avoided tourist spots and paid attention to residents' physical features, tattoo styles and accents, which feeds into NPC design and dialogue.

The reason, in Journal du Geek's telling, is scale: people spend hundreds of hours inside a GTA map, so the place needs its own texture. The same site notes that Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and that going there in person was the only way to capture a contrast Humphries is said to have described as wealth and poverty side by side, with crime and corruption linking the two worlds. Aroged arrives at the same idea by another route.

What exactly was said?

The sources diverge here, so here is which is which. Dork reproduces the line in English, with an ellipsis in the middle, and it is the only version we treat as literal in this piece. Journal du Geek and Mobidevices give different wordings from each other (one speaks of “late-night outings with ex-cops,” the other of “not limiting itself to tourist spots”), which points to paraphrase or second-hand translation of the same interview. Aroged also spells the surname “Humphreys.” We follow the “Humphries” spelling used by Dork, Journal du Geek and Mobidevices. We did not open Game Informer's original text, so final confirmation of the exact wording rests with the magazine.

Six regions, one fictional state

Dork points out that Rockstar has already named six regions of Leonida: Vice City, Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga National Park. The link between research and map is direct in at least one case: the real Keys have a mirror in the name Leonida Keys. Tying the Everglades to Grassrivers, say, is our guess, and none of the sources says so. For the scale of the map, see Leonida's map, nearly double GTA V.

The same Dork piece lists activities Rockstar has confirmed for the game: kayaking, street racing, off-road racing, airboat rides and beach scenes. Anyone who has seen an airboat in the Everglades can guess where that idea came from, but that is our reading, not a Rockstar statement.

Strip clubs are nothing new for the series

Journal du Geek rightly points out that these venues have been a fixture of the franchise since Vice City. What changes is the framing: instead of a script gag, Rockstar presents the visit as a working method for getting the tone of a real place right. That is the studio's defense, not our verdict on the result, which we can only give once the game is out.

What is still unknown

In the sources we read, nothing says how many trips there were, how many people went, which specific cities, neighborhoods or venues the team visited, or how the experience shows up in missions and characters. We also found no Rockstar post about it: the official hub rockstargames.com/VI has no news newer than September 24, and the story comes only from the magazine interview.

And for Brazilian players?

The game arrives on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with no PC version announced. The research on accents, by the way, will not reach Brazil as voice work: as we reported in GTA 6 will not have Portuguese dubbing, only subtitles, Portuguese comes through subtitles.