Grand Theft Auto games have always served up absurd and occasionally biting caricatures of American culture and excess, and it’s been over a decade since the last one was released. How will GTA 6 address the seismic political events of the last few years, from the election of President Trump to the once-in-a-century global pandemic that somehow spawned an anti-vaccine movement? Rockstar Games suggests it won’t, at least not directly.
“We run the risk of dating ourselves in a sort of awkward way,” Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson told The New York Times in a new interview when asked about major cultural turning points like Trump and covid. “So we have to look at things and go, ‘What is going to have a timeless sort of quality that will speak very easily to relatable sort of human folly and foibles and will be remembered as part of this time?’”
We’ve already seen GTA 6 make a few direct references to IRL people and topics. The first trailer showed off a man with dyed hair and tons of tattoos. A man dubbed “Florida Joker” who had his face tattooed after seeing Jared Leto in 2016’s Suicide Squad claimed that Rockstar was ripping off his likeness. And a recent leak showed a reference to a viral YouTube video of someone filling up their truck bed with gasoline back during a 2021 fuel shortage after a pipeline hack.
The question is whether GTA 6 will keep its jabs at contemporary society and recent history more subtle and mostly confined to pop culture, or whether it will fire indirect shots at recognizable figures and events, like Far Cry 5‘s “pee-tape” mission. GTA 5 had no shortage of references lampooning liberal politics, right-wing politicians, and reckless tech billionaires. But the discourse was also much less polarized back in 2013, and social media had yet to supercharge outrage culture.
“I think there’s always stuff to satirize,” Nelson told IGN in a separate preview. “As long as humans are humans, other humans will figure out ways to satirize what we do. For us, because we work on such a long development cycle, we have to not jump on stuff and instead choose our angle of approach carefully and decide what things are going to be a bit more timeless.”
He continued, “We’re not a TV show coming out every week or every month. We have to be careful that what we’re choosing to satirize is not going to feel dated in a weird way. I think those broader things are OK to satirize, but very specific political issues or memes will date fast. Even the way our characters speak we think about it a lot, so that they’re not using extremely contemporary slang. Even though our characters are a certain age, they need to feel somewhat timeless.”
