GTA 6: Phil Hooker, Rockstar's head of development since 2020

Phil Hooker is one of the three heads of development on Grand Theft Auto VI at Rockstar, with Rob Nelson and Aaron Garbut. Bloomberg, as reported by Eurogamer on October 14, 2026, says the three were promoted after co-founder Dan Houser left the company on March 11, 2020; Gamekult puts the decision in that same year. GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Rockstar Games publishes no biography of Hooker, and no tier 1 or tier 2 source gives the year he joined Rockstar North, the Edinburgh studio. His public record starts in October 2018, with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Date	Role	Source
October 2018	Director of technology at Rockstar North, on Red Dead Redemption 2	VG247, The Guardian
2020	Head of development on GTA 6, with Nelson and Garbut	Gamekult, Bloomberg via Eurogamer
October 14, 2026	Still head of development	Eurogamer, Gamekult, Insider Gaming

Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018

The Guardian described him on October 24, 2018 as “the master of these systems, bringing together the work of several hundred coders.” His aim, as he told Keza MacDonald: “We wanted, in this game, to be able to interact with anybody and for them to feel like a human being.” The animations and systems that took “were a lot more complex than ever before.”

A day earlier, he told VG247 why the PS4 and Xbox One version of GTA 5 never got those AI upgrades: “It’s such a complex mixture of animation, AI, and dialogue that we couldn’t unravel it without fear of breaking such a complex game.” He also discussed Euphoria, the physics animation tech covered on our GTA 6 engine page.

What he has said about GTA 6

In Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg feature of October 14, 2026, Hooker looked past GTA 6 to Rockstar’s next game: “the engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly.” That team grew from 2,441 to 4,711 staff, as broken down on our Rockstar team size page.

Insider Gaming, writing up Bloomberg the same day, attributes two more points to him. GTA 6’s delays never came from big dramatic problems, only from pieces not coming together in the planned time, and the team has changed things “within the last few months.” Hooker also described a test session that set out for a story mission and turned into a fender bender, a convenience store stop, a fight with an NPC who insulted him, a store robbery and a police chase. Two hours in, he still hadn’t come close to finishing the mission, a session our how long is GTA 6 page puts in context.