If you’ve never been to the US, it might surprise you that the country isn’t entirely made up of people in stars-and-stripes bikinis riding Harleys and twerking atop moving vehicles, alligators being fished from swimming pools, and grandmas dual-wielding sledgehammers. There’s a lot of that stuff for sure, especially in Miami, Florida, which the GTA 6 setting Vice City is based on, but life in the country as a whole is a lot more nuanced and, frankly, less entertaining in general. That’s why GTA is explicitly a satire, and a carefully considered one according to Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson.
“I think there’s always stuff to satirize,” Nelson tells IGN following GTA 6’s deep-dive from Netflix. “As long as humans are humans, other humans will figure out ways to satirize what we do.”
The stereotypes you see on TV, in movies, and playing games absolutely do exist here in the US, but they’re usually local to different parts of the country. You’ll see a very different episode of South Park, for example, if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are satirizing Portland, Oregon, compared to if they’re making fun of Stigler, Oklahoma. Rockstar is picky about the parts of American life it pokes fun at, not only because of the intensely divided political and social climate enveloping the country, but because development cycles outlast a lot of topics that would otherwise be fun to satirize.
“For us, because we work on such a long development cycle, we have to not jump on stuff and instead choose our angle of approach carefully and decide what things are going to be a bit more timeless,” Nelson says. “We’re not a TV show coming out every week or every month. We have to be careful that what we’re choosing to satirize is not going to feel dated in a weird way.
“I think those broader things are OK to satirize, but very specific political issues or memes will date fast. Even the way our characters speak we think about it a lot, so that they’re not using extremely contemporary slang. Even though our characters are a certain age, they need to feel somewhat timeless.”
GTA 6’s hand-crafted NPCs have over 600,000 animations compared to only 55,000 animations in GTA 5