Grand Theft Auto V – is it Trump’s fault there’s no GTA VI?

It doesn’t sound like Rockstar has actually started work on the new GTA, as Dan Houser implies it won’t be released while Trump is in office.

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Rockstar co-founder, and lead writer, Dan Houser has said that he’s ‘thankful’ he’s not releasing Grand Theft Auto VI while Donald Trump is president.

‘It’s really unclear what we would even do with it, let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did,’ said Houser in an interview with GQ magazine.

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 It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast.’




GTA V was first released in 2013, during the first year of Barack Obama’s second term as president. Over the years many have pointed out that the satire of GTA V has become the reality of the modern day and Houser’s comments are similar to those made by many comedians.

What’s also interesting about the comments is what they imply about a new GTA. It’s the first time Rockstar has ever really commented on the possibility of a new game and if Houser is taken literally it implies they haven’t started work on anything beyond perhaps the underlying technology.

The fact is that GTA V is still selling extremely well and is rarely ever out of the top 10 even at this time of the year, so especially with Red Dead Redemption II out this week there’s no rush for a new one from a monetary perspective.

There’s also the possibility that there won’t be a GTA VI in the traditional sense, but instead a sequel to GTA Online – which is what the current game owes its longevity to – that doesn’t rely on storytelling for its appeal.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that Houser is just being coy and that work has begun in secret. But if he really doesn’t want to release GTA VI until after Trump is out of office that means there won’t be a new GTA until early 2021. If he wins a second term, then not until 2025.

Although of course that’s assuming he doesn’t get impeached before then…

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