GTA 6 is deliberately avoiding direct political references, says Rockstar
Rockstar writer says it wants to avoid recreating ‘the exact world we live in’
A Rockstar Games writer has explained why it’s avoiding putting direct political references into Grand Theft Auto 6, stating that it doesn’t want to recreate “the exact world we live in” or prematurely age the game.
Rupert Humphries, Rockstar’s senior vice president of narrative, made the comments in a new issue of Love Magazine, in a broad discussion about how the studio has handled political satire in the open-world sequel.
Humphries said Rockstar wanted the fictional state of Leonida to feel recognizably contemporary without tying its satire too closely to any one real-world political figure.
“If you go back to the previous GTAs, there’s never really been much focus on national politics,” he said. “The rise of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act were pretty central to GTAIV, 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.
“Making a game in Florida, though, there is so much to work with, and we have really tried to build out our world-filling it with all the characters and culture wars necessary to make it feel alive. And then we have so many ways to tell these stories outside of actually meeting characters face to face.”
Rockstar says it needs to consider how long GTA takes to make
Humphries said players will encounter election signs, receive robocalls from campaigns, and hear commercials and political talk shows on the radio. The result is a deliberately distorted version of Florida rather than a straightforward recreation, he said.
“There is a big focus on not just holding up a mirror, but on making everything satirical, larger than life, and more grotesque. Otherwise, you could just go outside and live in the real world! We try to get to the heart of whatever issue we want to talk about and then explode the part of it we find interesting until the ridiculousness of the position becomes really clear and hopefully funny, too.”
Another consideration for Rockstar is the amount of time GTA games take to make – it’s been 13 years since the series’ last instalment.
“We work on it for years and years, so you need to make content that will feel vital to the moment of release,” Humphries said. “If there’s a trend blowing up for six months, you need to see it for what it is and not jump on the bandwagon.
“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. 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.”
