Rockstar Co-Founder Thinks GTA 6 is a Bad Idea in the Trump Era

Rockstar is kind of in hot water these days thanks to that giant exposé Kotaku just published about their horrible culture of crunch, but unfortunately, they’re not exactly in a position to avoid the public eye now that Red Dead Redemption 2 is on the way. It was an issue that was kind of skirted around in an interview between GQ and Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, although the interview started with something a little more interesting than questions about this well-documented crunch problem: relief that their next game was Red Dead Redemption 2 and not GTA 6.

Because in the era of Mr. Donald Trump, that’s the kind of game that could maybe get them in trouble, or at least be hard to satire.

“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 It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast."

I’m not entirely sure how much I agree with his logic here, and I can tell at a glance that he’s trying to phrase things delicately to avoid offending either parties. Which sort of undercuts the whole “vibe” Rockstar games typically tries to put out, which is a little weird but whatever. It also struck me as a weird way to start the interview, considering I very much doubt there’s even discussion of GTA 6, with GTA 5 still making more money than god.

Still, if you were hankering for a look into the mind of Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, you have it.