Development on GTA 6 began back in 2015. Keep that date in mind, because it underpins everything Rockstar has said about which targets the game will and won’t take aim at.
Speaking to French publication Trois Couleurs, Rob Nelson, Rockstar Games' head of development, explained that any satire of American culture the studio writes has to outlive a production schedule long enough for the culture to move on first. Questioned specifically about the Covid pandemic and Donald Trump’s presidency, he laid out why neither is an obvious fit.
The math of a decade-long punchline
“We develop on very long cycles,” Nelson said. “The game’s been in development since 2015, so the idea is gestating for a long time. The majority of the team really started rolling on to it after Red Dead Redemption 2 released in 2018.”
The lag is the whole problem. A gag written in year three has to pass through a writers’ room, casting, a shoot and an implementation pass before any player ever sees it.
“We have to be very careful about what ideas we choose to put in there, because it can take a long time to figure out what our angle is on this,” Nelson said. “Because by the time we write it and cast it and shoot it, and implement it, whatever it is – it could be gone, it could change, it could be dated. And so we’re always trying to think about whether something will stand the test of time.”
Jason and Lucia have other problems
According to Nelson, the studio tends to reach only for material that serves the story it wants to tell and the world its protagonists live in. That opens up an intriguing angle: the things players might see as defining the United States today may be of no concern whatsoever to Jason and Lucia.
The pair are fugitives. Debates about the pandemic are unlikely to rank high among their concerns.
“I think there will always be things to satirise,” Nelson said. “There are always ridiculous situations and behaviours that we can find, but we just have to be careful about what we pick.”
What survives the cut
Nelson insists the satire itself is staying put; what’s being filtered is where it comes from. As an example of material with staying power, he singled out the “stupid challenges” that influencers and streamers put themselves through.
Fielding the same question from The New York Times, he offered much the same reasoning, noting that Rockstar wanted to avoid “the risk of dating ourselves in a sort of awkward way” by leaning on Trump and Covid.
“So we have to look at things and go, What is going to have a timeless sort of quality that will speak very easily to relatable sort of human folly and foibles and will be remembered as part of this time?” Nelson said.
Human folly and foibles – that’s the assignment. The news cycle isn’t.