GTA 6
Rockstar
GTA 6 is currently very popular, not because of any new development in the game, but because of an unfortunately old comment from Rockstar’s Dan Houser regarding the game and its eventual release date.
Donald Trump won the presidency for a second time early Wednesday, and we can now remember what Houser said in 2018 regarding his tenure, as he told GQ magazine that he was “grateful” that GTA 6 would not be released during Trump’s term.
“It’s really unclear what we’re going to do with it, let alone how upset people will be with everything we’re doing,” he added. “Both intense liberal progressivism and extreme conservatism are both very extreme and very angry. It’s scary but also strange, and yet they both seem sometimes to veer into the absurd. It’s hard to make fun of for those reasons. Some things, you see, it’s straight beyond satire, and they’ll get old.” “In two minutes, everything changes very quickly.”
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GTA 6 is said to be scheduled to be released in the fall of 2025, or worst case, sometime in 2026 which would be in the middle of… another Trump term, even though it has been 7 to 8 years since that comment. Instead, Trump did something that had previously been nearly impossible: he won again after losing after his first term, something that had not happened in more than a century, and which was certainly difficult to predict.
GTA 6
Rockstar
It’s also relevant considering that GTA 6 is set in a fairly deep red state of Florida, called Leonida, and returns to the state for the first time since Vice City. The state’s landscape has changed dramatically over the years (certainly since the 1980s when Vice City was set). Trump won the state by a full 13 points in this election, a far cry from what the state had to barely keep George W. Bush back from the edge in 2000.
So does this mean that GTA 6 is “old” as Houser says? One issue is that Rockstar may have been doing some satirical Trump-adjacent things since the game was in production during his tenure, and he was a fixture in Florida with his Mar-a-Lago club and the like. So they may produce parody content crediting a character who is now a president again during its release. Houser seems to think this is a bad thing, but who knows how much of this actually exists or if they’ve skipped anything political. The game’s first trailer mainly showed off the absurdity of “Florida Man-like” content based on real-world video and events from the state.
Do elements of Trump’s parody seem relevant or outdated as he enters a second term? Since they probably couldn’t avoid it completely, we might find out within a year.
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