Much before Rockstar Games published the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, a group of amateur gamers, topographers, and 3D modelers was already secretly tracing the roads, bays, and skyscrapers of the state of Leonida.
They call themselves the GTA VI Mapping Project, a collaborative community initiative born on the forums of GTAForums and Reddit that has demonstrated astonishing accuracy: back in 2012 they managed to reconstruct the map of GTA V with 90% accuracy a year before the game came out.
But with GTA VI, the challenge was infinitely more ambitious. We analyze the scientific method that allowed these enthusiasts to calculate that Leonida will encompass more than 120 square kilometers of playable surface.
The telemetry method: X, Y, Z coordinates
The great leap forward of the project occurred when analyzing the debug tools that appeared on screen in the 2022 development leaks.
In the bottom left corner of several technical clips, Rockstar developers kept the RAGE engine telemetry box activated, showing the absolute spatial coordinates of the character:
- X Axis: East - west coordinate (in meters).
- Y Axis: North - south coordinate (in meters).
- Z Axis: Altitude above sea level.
By recording the exact position where Jason entered a roadside diner (Hank’s Waffles) and comparing it with Lucia’s coordinates in a Vice City subway station, cartographers obtained the actual metric distance between both points.
They discovered that the distance between the known extremes of the map exceeded 14,000 meters (14 kilometers) in a straight line, pulverizing the dimensions of any previous map in the franchise.
Photogrammetry and landmark triangulation
After the premiere of the first official trailer in December 2023, the Mapping Project team applied professional photogrammetry and trigonometry techniques:
- The Ocean Drive curve: They identified the real South Beach hotels and palm trees visible in the footage and calculated the viewing angle of Rockstar’s virtual camera lens.
- Vanishing points on the horizon: In aerial shots from the county patrol helicopter, distant skyscrapers can be distinguished on the horizon. By tracing sightlines towards iconic Vice City buildings, they calculated the curvature of the terrain and the distance to neighboring islands.
- The Keys highway (Overseas Highway): By measuring the spacing between the concrete pillars of the maritime bridges and the relative size of the passenger cars driving on them, they estimated the length of the southern archipelago at more than 6 kilometers of viaducts over the water.
Scale comparison: Leonida vs Los Santos and RDR2
The consolidated result of the Mapping Project reveals an unprecedented territorial scale in video games:
| Map | Estimated land surface | Key geographic features |
|---|---|---|
| GTA: San Andreas (2004) | ~36 km² | 3 small cities divided by highways and desert. |
| GTA V - Los Santos (2013) | ~49 km² of land (~75 km² with water) | A large city to the south and mountainous mass with a central lake to the north. |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) | ~75 km² of land | 5 states with great biological variety, but oriented towards horseback movement. |
| GTA VI - State of Leonida (2026) | ~120 - 130 km² of land | Multiple cities (Vice City, Port Gellhorn), immense navigable swamps, archipelagos and rural counties. |
This scale of 120 km² not only represents Rockstar’s largest map, but its densest: unlike the rugged mountains of Mount Chiliad that occupied huge portions of GTA V with little interactive content, Leonida is mostly flat, which means that practically 95% of its surface is navigable and explorable in vehicles by land, sea and air.