It seems that the long awaited GTA 6 might not even get made in today’s political climate of extreme left and rights, according to Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser.
In a new (and excellent) interview with GQ, Houser explained that making a new Grand Theft Auto – a series known for biting satire of American culture – in this day and age is terribly tricky proposition.
Houser suggested that a game like GTA 6 would almost be destined to offend people in this day and age, whether those people sat on the left or right of the political spectrum. Hell, it’d probably find a way to offend all of them at once.
He explained:
It’s really unclear what we would even do with it, let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did. Both intense liberal progression and intense conservatism are both very militant, and very angry. It is scary but it’s also strange, and yet both of them seem occasionally to veer towards the absurd. It’s hard to satirise for those reasons. Some of the stuff you see is straightforwardly beyond satire. It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast.
This isn’t to say that we won’t see a new Grand Theft Auto game eventually, of course – the franchise makes far too much money for it to go away forever. But based on Houser’s comments, it certainly seems like we’ll be waiting a while for GTA 6 to make an appearance – at least until the current political climate calms down.
It’s also important to note that the game has been rumoured to have been in production for a while now, so there’s a chance Houser simply means the game wouldn’t release at this time, not that it won’t get made at all.
Meanwhile, we can all look forward to the much more serious Red Dead Redemption 2. It releases this Friday (October 26) and will almost certainly not feature any kind of satire regarding the world as it is today.
The anticipated cowboy epic will arrive on PlayStation4 and Xbox One, but a PC version could also arrive in 2019, according to new reports.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.