In 2018, one of Rockstar Games’ co-founders revealed concerns about releasing Grand Theft Auto 6 during Donald Trump’s presidency – his original presidency. This was during an interview between Dan Houser and GQ.
While the co-founder of one of the most prolific firms in gaming has since moved on, his comments remain – and Donald Trump is now back in the Oval Office, less than a year before Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to be released.
Let’s dive into this.
How Could Donald Trump Screw With GTA 6?
In the 2018 interview with GQ, Dan Houser expressed worries about releasing GTA 6 while Donald Trump was Chief Diplomat, going on record saying:
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 It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast.
In a way, Houser was referring more to the state of society when Donald Trump was in office, given that he and GQ referred to it as the ‘age of Trump’. Today, we live in a world where cancel culture can strike a project down overnight – but it’s admittedly tough to imagine a touch of satire taking GTA 6 off the shelves post-launch.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Rockstar Games has woven a puffed-up, ostentatious, wild-haired billionaire character into GTA 6. He’s running for office in the state of Leonida, and to get there, he’s colluding with Russian heavies or something. Life imitating art, art imitating life, whatever we want to call it.
How well would something like that sit with the 72 million or so people who just voted Donald Trump into office?
Throughout the GTA series, Rockstar Games has parodied the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Paris Hilton, and of course, ‘celebrity Republicans’. How can we forget Jock Cranley, the scarily Trump-esque politician who features in a small role in 2013’s GTA 5?
Jock Cranley was a conservative candidate running for office in the State of San Andreas. He boasted some seriously skewed policies, outright insulted the opposition, and appeared on television and talk shows to take part in bizarre smear campaigns and to talk about his attraction to teenage girls.
Despite all this, Jock Cranley was loved because he was a celebrity Republican.
Does that ring a bell?
Now.
Donald Trump wouldn’t take kindly to being mocked in Grand Theft Auto 6, and as Dan Houser explained in 2018, the trends move so quickly that something written in could be taken in bad taste when the game was eventually released, even if it would have been fine just weeks before.
Donald Trump has also been outspoken against ‘violent video games’ and the ‘effect’ that they have on young people.
And Leonida is based on a state that’s inherently loyal to Trump’s party. As we’ve seen, Rockstar has pulled no punches when it came to mocking some of the more stereotypical, viral aspects of Florida.
Let’s come back to reality, though. It’s almost impossible to believe that Donald Trump will derail the launch of GTA 6. If he did, the public opinion of him would probably plummet, given that tens of millions of gamers across the United States have been waiting a decade for GTA 6 to hit the market.
It’s funny to imagine it happening, though.
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