It’s not easy to predict the future. You do the best you can with the information on hand, sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. Case in point: Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who said in 2018 that he was thankful the studio wasn’t releasing a new Grand Theft Auto game amidst a Donald Trump presidency, because the political climate in the US made it “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,” Houser said at the time, which I will again remind you was in 2018—seven years ago. “It’s hard to satirize 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 It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast.”
It is deeply ironic then that GTA 6 is going to drop smack in the middle of a Trump presidency—a second one (yet not a second consecutive term), which was all but unthinkable when Houser made his comment, and at the same time prophetic: Everything is indeed changing so fast, and if satire isn’t dead it’s at the very least taking a brutal ass-kicking with no end in sight. Absurdity has become the norm.
But it’s also interesting that, intentionally or otherwise, Rockstar may have figured out a way around that difficulty: Ignore it entirely. Neither of the GTA 6 trailers we’ve seen so far, including the new one that dropped today, have made any visible reference to Trump, much less any sort of direct parody, or to other relevant political hot points. The game is pretty clearly set in the here-and-now, but there’s no mention of the Covid-19 pandemic, no mask jokes or Fauci gags, and no overt MAGA imagery or anything that cleaves close to the actual real world.
It’s quite possible that GTA 6 will feature a Trump-like figure—the Mar-a-Lago resort would absolutely not be out of place in Leonida—and Rockstar is simply holding the reveal back: The new game is still a year away, after all (and doubtlessly longer for those of us on PC).
The series hasn’t shied away from sensitive subjects in the past, including illegal immigration and private military corporations in GTA 5, and as Grand Theft Auto loremaster Rich Stanton pointed out to me, the series has previous featured a Trump-esque figure: Billionaire developer and cannibal Donald Love, who appeared in Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and Liberty City stories.
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But there’s also a chance that Rockstar will want to stay in its own little walled garden—a world that’s very much like ours superficially, but that avoids becoming embroiled in topics that have the potential to be genuinely controversial. The GTA series was arguably more provocative, and intentionally so, back when the mere idea of a videogame that lets you go on senseless crime sprees could shock. At least for now, Rockstar doesn’t seem to be courting wrath like it used to, not even indirectly mocking Trump or his followers.
For a studio that was once held up as the embodiment of all the ills that plague our society, it’s more than a little weird to think of Rockstar as playing it safe with GTA 6. But as Houser said seven years ago, these are strange times indeed.
However it ultimately works out, it’s not Houser’s problem anymore: He left Rockstar in 2020 and is now heading up a new studio called Absurd Ventures.