GTA 6 has been in development since 2015. That’s the number that explains everything else Rockstar has said about what it will and won’t make fun of.
Rob Nelson, Rockstar Games' head of development, told French outlet Trois Couleurs that the studio’s satire of American culture has to survive a production timeline long enough to outlast the culture itself. Asked directly about the Covid pandemic and Donald Trump’s presidency, he explained why those particular targets aren’t a natural 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.”
That gap does the work. Write a joke in year three, and by the time it reaches a player it’s been through a writers’ room, a casting session, a shoot and an implementation pass.
“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
Nelson also said Rockstar was only likely to pick elements that work with the story it wanted to tell and the world its characters inhabited. Which raises a genuinely interesting possibility: Jason and Lucia may simply not care about the things players would consider emblematic of the U.S. right now.
They’re criminals on the run. Pandemic discourse probably isn’t top of the list.
What survives the cut
The satire isn’t going anywhere, according to Nelson. It’s the sourcing that’s selective. He pointed to the “stupid challenges” undertaken by influencers and streamers as the kind of material that keeps.
“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.”
Asked the same question by The New York Times, he gave a version of the same answer, saying Rockstar didn’t want “the risk of dating ourselves in a sort of awkward way” with 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 brief. Not the news cycle.
