GTA 6 is so detailed that no Rockstar employee knows everything – that’s how we got shrinking horse testicles in Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2’s famous animated horse testicles, realistic enough to contract in cold weather and expand again in warm weather, were apparently not a feature mandated by Rockstar. As iconic as they have become – a symbol of extraordinary detail in the game – they did not come from a list of features that needed to be added to the game. Rather, the horse testicles were the unexpected work of a person, or group of people, working independently on the Cowboy epic.

Journalist Jason Schreier heard this anecdote from Rockstar development chief Aaron Garbut during a visit to Rockstar North to write a detailed report for Bloomberg on the making of GTA 6. “Garbut talked about it,” Schreier said in a YouTube video. “(Horse testicles were) not something that was on a long list of features to do; it wasn’t something that an art director said to an artist, ‘All right, we need to put these horse testicles here – better put it on nights and weekends so you can put these horse testicles here.’

“It’s something that people, or a single person, autonomously decided: ‘OK, I’m going to do this because I think it’s a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it.’ We are also verifying the veracity of this anecdote with Rockstar.

And this anecdote is important because it relates to something else Garbut told Schreier, which was that no one at Rockstar knows everything that’s in GTA 6 because it’s too big and too detailed to do so. “Nobody has all this in mind,” Garbut was quoted as saying.

“Nobody has all this on their mind” -Aaron Garbut

That, plus the fact that developers apparently have “the autonomy to put cool things in,” Schreier said, means there could be another unexpected feature like horse testicles in GTA 6. And given the GTA 6 nudity-related video leaks we’ve already had, maybe the features aren’t that far off.

Schreier’s video revealed a few other insights learned during his trip to Rockstar. It was said that the roads in GTA 6 are apparently “significantly narrower” than in GTA 5, so players feel the effects of traffic more – a detail that ties into the increased levels of realism in GTA 6.

He also learned that some artists had been working on GTA 6 for 11 years, and that while there were “five out of six people” on the GTA 5 art production team, there were – or are – 65 people on the GTA 6 art production team. Note that Rockstar, as a company, has roughly doubled in size since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, going from 2,441 employees to 4,711 spread across 12 offices.

There is also information about the origins of the “hold left trigger” context-sensitive interaction system introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2, which, again, apparently came from someone working autonomously on the game – Phil Hooker (now CTO) – rather than one of the game’s creative leads. Additionally, many experiments were apparently conducted to find a replacement for GTA’s radial menu, but the team ultimately returned to it.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will of course be released in a month, on November 19th. The road to launch has been rocky, however, with Rockstar North currently battling an employment tribunal in Scotland over allegations of unfair dismissals of 31 employees, and with a series of leaked gameplay footage exposing GTA 6 in ways beyond Rockstar’s control.