🤔 Rockstar has explained why it hasn’t directly made any real-world political references in GTA 6
👉 The reason for doing so is to make the game feel contemporary without being tied to any real-world figures
🐊 Instead, Rockstar contends there is enough material in the setting of Florida as it is, and that the game is designed to be specific to the moment it is released
📻 Likewise, the game is set to be filled with lots of ways to engage with its satire, with everything from election signs to radio commercials and more
One of Rockstar’s senior writers has explained why GTA 6’s writing avoids direct political references, and the answer is more interesting than you might think.
As per an article in the new issue of Love Magazine (thanks, VGC), Rupert Humphries, Rockstar’s senior vice president of narrative, has explained how the studio has handled political satire in the new game.
He stated that Rockstar wanted Leonida to feel contemporary without tying the satire it was portraying too closely to any real-world figure. Humphries explained that Rockstar is “trying to make games that feel very specific to the moment they are released, but at the same time, not reflective of the exact world we live in, we don’t want to be too specific about any particular person, event, movement, or anything like that.”
He continued that making a game set in Florida provided a wealth of material to go on and that Rockstar has “really tried to build out our world-filling it with all the characters and culture wars necessary to make it feel alive”.
This includes a wealth of material outside of character interactions, such as when players encounter election signs, receive robocalls from political campaigns, and hear commercials and political talk shows on the in-game radio.
Furthermore, Humphries explained the entire point of GTA’s satire was not to just hold up a mirror, but rather to make everything “larger than life, and more grotesque”. He contends that Rockstar tries “to get to the heart of whatever issue we want to talk about and then explode the part of it we find interesting until the ridiculousness of the position becomes really clear and hopefully funny, too.”
The time difference between GTA 5 and GTA 6 is also key, as Humphries noted that the in-game content needs to feel “vital to the moment of release” and that “If there’s a trend blowing up for six months, you need to see it for what it is and not jump on the bandwagon.”
In the writing process for GTA 6, Humphries explained that Rockstar took things that interested the studio, such as “conspiracy theories” and “the strange ways the public reacts to everyday occurrences, and those are the kinds of things we ran with.”
He elaborated that, “In most cases, rather than trying to put a like-for-like of something real in the world, we have created our own slanted, overblown versions, be that a conspiracy theory, or another universal contemporary phenomenon.”
It seems the studio is willing to lift the lid a little more in the coming weeks ahead of GTA 6’s release on various points, as we also recently learnt more about GTA 6’s rather elaborate weather system.
Rockstar recently also unveiled a $400 GTA 6 Collector’s Edition with some cool extras, including Oakley sunglasses, figurines and more, but some of the items we feel like we’ve seen before.
GTA 6 is out November 19, 2026, for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Up next: Xbox Elite Series 3 controller leaks again – this time via Xbox Design Lab
Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.