No Dubai Labubus, please.
Creating a timely satire can be tough when development takes half a decade or more - it's the reason South Park's stuck with its crude art style for literal decades, but the developers of GTA 6 can't just replace their world-class tech with paper cutouts. Instead, the team simply tried to avoid trends that would become outdated come launch.
"We work on it for years and years," Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, Rupert Humphries, told Love Magazine, "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." While South Park can centre an entire episode on demonic Labubus and squeeze out some laughs while they're still hot, GTA doesn't quite have the same luxury.
Rather than betting on memes that expired years ago, Rockstar leaned into "things that interested us, like conspiracy theories," Humphries added. "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's always been a darkly satirical series, but it frequently tackles tougher subjects too. One notable constant is how the series deals with the American Dream and how the public's attitude toward the American Dream has shifted through the years.
Asked about the subject, Humphries explained that GTA 4 was already a "kind of hollow commentary on the illusion of America as a land of opportunity," while GTA 5's overwhelming cynicism was a sort-of doubling down on the idea. What about today's world? And GTA 6's? "Maybe the American Dream is more modest now," Humphries added. "It's a house for your family and your loans paid off instead of wild success - but maybe today, that is just out of reach for the average person. Miami and Southern Florida are a particular frontline for this battle between astronomical wealth and unbounded ambition, creating a pressure cooker for all kinds of insanity."
Humphries stops short of explaining what GTA 6's take on the American Dream is exactly, but his interpretation might certainly be a clue to Jason and Lucia's motivations. Perhaps they're not chasing excessive, bottomless pools of cash with no end in sight like the GTA protagonists before them. We'll find out when GTA 6 launches next month on the 19th of November.
