Red Dead Redemption 2’s infamous animated horse testicles, which are realistic enough to contract in cold weather and expand again in the warmth, were apparently not a feature mandated by Rockstar. As iconic as they’ve become – a symbol of extraordinary detail in the game – they didn’t originate from a list of features that needed to be added to the game. The horse testicles were instead the unexpected work of one person, or a group of people, autonomously working on the Cowboy epic.
Journalist Jason Schreier heard this anecdote from Rockstar head of development Aaron Garbut while visiting Rockstar North to write an expansive report for Bloomberg about the making of GTA 6. “Garbut actually brought this up,” Schreier said in a video on YouTube. “[The horse testicles were] not something that was on some big list of features to make; it was not something that an art director told an artist, ‘Alright, we’ve got to get those horse testicles in here – better put in nights and weekends so you can get these horse testicles in here.’
“That was something that people, or a person on their own, 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’re checking the veracity of this anecdote with Rockstar, by the way.
And that anecdote is important because it relates to another thing Schreier was told by Garbut, which was that no one person at Rockstar knows everything that’s in GTA 6 because it’s too big and detailed to do that. “There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head,” Garbut apparently said.
“There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head” -Aaron Garbut
That, coupled with the fact that developers apparently have “autonomy to put in things that are cool”, Schreier said, means there could be another unexpected feature like horse testicles in GTA 6. And given the nudity-related GTA 6 video leaks we’ve already had, perhaps the features aren’t that far removed.
Schreier’s video revealed a few other tidbits of information learnt on his trip to Rockstar. He was told that roads in GTA 6 are “significantly narrower” than in GTA 5, apparently, so players feel the effects of traffic more – a detail that relates to the increased levels of realism in GTA 6.
He also heard how some artists had been working on GTA 6 for 11 years, and whereas there were “five of six” people in GTA 5’s art production team, there were – or are – 65 people in GTA 6’s art production team. Note that Rockstar, as a company, has roughly doubled in size since the release of 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, growing from 2,441 employees to 4,711 across 12 offices.
There’s also some information about the origins of the contextual ‘hold left trigger’ interaction system introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2, which again, apparently came from someone autonomously working on the game – Phil Hooker (now director of technology) – rather than from one of the game’s creative leads. Also, many experiments were apparently done to find a replacement for GTA’s radial menu but in the end, the team reverted back to it.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is, of course, releasing a month from now on 19th November. The road to launch has been bumpy, however, with Rockstar North currently embroiled in an employment tribunal in Scotland over the alleged unjust firings of 31 employees, and with a series of gameplay footage leaks exposing GTA 6 in ways that are outside of Rockstar’s control.
