Summary
Details about and dev chatter concerning GTA 6 continue to drip out as part of the marketing push towards its console launch in November. This time, some of the aspects of it I’m most intrigued to see how Rockstar have handled whenever they deign to bring it to PC have been discussed - how they’ve approached satirising the societal climate of America in 2026 through allusions to politics and the American dream. In an interview with Love Magazine, because GTA 6 is all about romance, Rockstar senior vice president of narrative Rupert Humphries touched on both. Asked how central politics is to the game, given one of the screenshots of its Ambrosia region features signs trying to secure votes for someone named Erin Henshaw, the writer emphasised that the studio have sought not to tie any of their satire too heavily to specific figures or groups that might lead its world to quickly feel out of date. “If you go back to the previous GTAs, there’s never really been much focus on national politics,” Humphries said. “The rise of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act were pretty central to GTA 4, but that was mainly because post-9/11 New York was a real frontline for those issues. Because we are trying to make games that feel very specific to the moment they are released, but at the same time, not reflective of the exact world we live in, we don’t want to be too specific about any particular person, event, movement, or anything like that.” The likes of election signs, robocalls from political campaigns, and political issue-laden radio talk shows all exist to help flesh out GTA 6’s parody of Florida, with Rockstar’s “big focus” having been on “not just holding up a mirror, but on making everything satirical, larger than life, and more grotesque” rather than more directly mimicking the real world. “We took things that interested us, like the conspiracy theories, the strange ways the public reacts to everyday occurrences, and those are the kinds of things we ran with,” Humphries explained in response to another question about Rockstar’s satirical approach. “In most cases, rather than trying to put a like-for-like of something real in the world, we have created our own slanted, overblown versions, be that a conspiracy theory, or another universal contemporary phenomenon.” To my reading, the general point of emphasis is more on Rockstar not wanting to tie themselves too tightly to any narrow window in time, given the game’ll have to last many years into the future, rather than the studio deliberately ducking making more general political themes and issues key to the foundations of their virtual world. There is perhaps something to be said for GTA 4’s story, the one picked out here as leaning most specifically into the political atmosphere of the decade it depicts, leading that game to serve as a more effectively memorable time capsule than GTA 5 in my eyes. Then again, the latter came along prior to a lot of the political events which came to define the 2010s in the US. Here’s looking at you, 2016 election. GTA: San Andreas’ grounding in the crack epidemic, Rodney King riots, and Rampart scandal of the 1990s is another example of GTA leaning into specifics in order to set up a satirical portrayal defined by the pressing issues of its era and setting. Elsewhere in the interview, Humphries was asked specifically about satirising the concept of the American dream at the present moment compared to in the past. “Some would say the American dream collapsed a long time ago,” he responded. “With GTA 4 we told an immigrant’s story that was supposed to be a kind of hollow commentary on the illusion of America as a land of opportunity, and then we sort of doubled down on that with the cynicism of GTA 5. Maybe the American dream is more modest now. It’s a house for your family and your loans paid off instead of wild success - but maybe today, that is just as out of reach for the average person.” That’s an acknowledgement of the current cost of living crisis, with Humphries picking out Florida as a “front line” for the “battle between astronomical wealth and unbounded ambition”. Thus far, a lot of what’s been shown off of GTA 6 has felt more in the vein of GTA 5-style glitzy action adventure than it has GTA 4-style grit that skews closer to reality. That said, plenty of what Humphries said here hints at potential for the next entry not to totally duck the challenge of satirising a US political climate dripping with far-right extremism and steeped in ludicrous memes. Outside of promoting their latest work, Rockstar Games are currently embroiled in an employment tribunal hearing over their firing of 34 developers last year. The company have accused the fired staff of risking leaking info about the game, while the union representing the workers have accused Rockstar of union-busting. Read this next
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