Rockstar Writer Says GTA 6 is Avoiding Direct Political References - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 October 2026 / 1,833 Views
Rockstar Games writer Rupert Humphries in a new issue of Love Magazine says the team intentionally acoided making direct political references in Grand Theft Auto VI as the team didn't want to recreate "the exact world we live in."
"If you go back to the previous GTAs, there’s never really been much focus on national politics," he said (via VideoGamesChronicle). "The rise of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act were pretty central to GTAIV, but that was mainly because post-9/11 New York was a real frontline for those issues.
"Because we are 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.
"Making a game in Florida, though, there is so much to work with, and we have really tried to build out our world-filling it with all the characters and culture wars necessary to make it feel alive. And then we have so many ways to tell these stories outside of actually meeting characters face to face."
Humphries did say players will come across election signs, receive robocalls from campaigns, and hear commercials and political talk shows on the radio. The ultimate result is a distorted version of Florida rather a recreation of Florida as it is today.
"There is a big focus on not just holding up a mirror, but on making everything satirical, larger than life, and more grotesque," he said. "Otherwise, you could just go outside and live in the real world! We try 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."
He added, "We work on it for years and years, so you need to make content that will feel vital to the moment of release. 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.
"We took things that interested us, like the conspiracy theories, the strange ways the public reacts to everyday occurrences, and those are the kinds of things we ran with. 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."
Grand Theft Auto VI will launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Well of course, everything political that would have been there when the game started development, would be very dated.
TBH I feel like its more Rockstar didn’t want to run the gamble of making a polutical statement in a project they pour over a billion USD into.
DeSantis has been governor for 8 years now,
Good!, I play games to have fun and unwind, not to piss me off with political rubbish
"Making a game in Florida, though, there is so much to work with" I actually loled 😆
no politics, just extreme violence
This is great plausible deniability when people get upset about a naked homeless man in the game called Ronald Dump
