In GTA 6, Florida Will Write The Jokes Itself

Since its inception, Grand Theft Auto has always built itself on humour. In the 2D days that was the simple, darkly funny premise of mowing down pedestrians – the stuff that fuelled Carmageddon’s popularity and notoriety. In the years since, the jokes have become more sophisticated, building into a blunt satire of the United States of America.

It’s been over a decade since Grand Theft Auto 5, though, and the cultural landscape of the US has shifted considerably during that period. The 2016 election seemed the runway for a spiral of increasingly absurd changes, encompassing everything from capitalist greed to pandemic mismanagement and a literal political insurrection. In 2018, Rockstar co-founder and GTA’s former head writer Dan Houser said, “Some of the stuff you see is straightforwardly beyond satire.” So, in the 2020s, how do you satirise America? The answer suggested by GTA 6’s trailer is that you simply hold up a mirror.

For this next-generation rendition of Vice City – an analogue of Miami, Florida – it appears that Rockstar is replicating reality in its most direct manner yet. Multiple sequences in the trailer are near enough exact recreations of real viral Floridian stories. The guy with the Joker make-up? He’s based on a real criminal. The dude streaking past a gas station, police in chase? That’s a riff on a genuine naked felon. The woman twerking on the roof of a car speeding down the causeway? That actually happened. These are all examples of the ‘Florida man’, a meme that grew out of countless absurd headlines that all contain the same phrase: “Police arrest Florida man for drunken joy ride on motorized scooter at Walmart” and “Florida man killed after dog steps on gas pedal” are just two examples. And so it seems that, through the recreation of these real events, one of GTA 6’s new sources of humour will be simply reflecting embarrassing reality and saying “This is you.” In short, Florida will write the jokes itself.

To what extent the full picture of Florida will be reflected by Rockstar remains to be seen. It’s easy to dunk on a strange member of the public, but there are tougher, more significant opponents. While it has always been content to punch in all directions, Grand Theft Auto has traditionally had a left-ish view of America – hardly punk, never socialist, but capitalism and conservatism has always been a core focus. With the majority of the series having been released during the Bush administration, there has been no shortage of right-wing targets. But prior games rarely reflected specific figures or policies, instead content to build exaggerated stereotypes. But in modern day Florida, those stereotypes are running the castle. So will GTA 6’s mirror be turned on the state’s deeply controversial governor, Ron DeSantis, and his myriad of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-migrant, and pro-gun policies? Will echoes of specific Republicans hold office in Vice City the same way its streets will be populated with Florida Men? We’ll see how bold the developer is in 2025.

While it’s easy to assume that Rockstar will shy away from anything truly controversial, there’s reason to expect at least some topical commentary. The studio’s approach to satire has gradually developed overtime, becoming increasingly wider in scope. Grand Theft Auto’s relationship with lampooning the US began in earnest during the 3D era – the trio of games released during the PlayStation 2 and Xbox console generation. GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas were largely interested in replicating the sensibilities of landmark crime cinema and so much of the comedy was found in their homage to character tropes established by the likes of Goodfellas and Scarface. But in creating its fictionalised cities, Rockstar filled every street and airwave with constant jabs at America’s rampant capitalism and consumerism. These ranged from dirty school-boy puns (GTA’s Sprite analogue, Sprunk, is a play on spunk, the British slang for ejaculate) to outrageous commercials rooted in the US’s patriotism, jingoism, and perceived self-obsession.

GTA 3 featured an ad for the Dormatron, a dangerous weight loss device that made snide fun of fat people in something of a warped commentary on obesity and toxic diet culture. In San Andreas, promotions for fried chicken shop Cluckin’ Bell made fun of real KFC animal cruelty accusations. And in Vice City, a repurposed army chemical agent-turned-household disinfectant featured in a commercial that laughed at idolising the military and corporate negligence (a baby practically boils alive during the ad due to exposure).

While a significant portion of the 3D era’s jokes were rooted in products and commercials, there were gags that reached for a more serious form of satire. Vice City’s ‘Is Your Child a Red’ infomercial put America’s anti-communism hysteria firmly in the crosshair, while also targeting other societal issues – it asked parents to look out for youngsters reading “complicated literature” and having “concern for their fellow man”, a jab at the country’s undervaluing of education and the individualism that was so prevalent during the ‘80s Regan administration. Political gags such as this could be found in all three games; in San Andreas, Proposition 421 suggested that people should be able to legally shoot and kill a smoker in self-defence, a clear parody of the country’s absurdist lawmaking and hard-line leftist officials.

This humour is now the bedrock of Grand Theft Auto and you’ll find it in between every fibre in both GTA 4 and 5. But as the series progressed into the HD era, the jokes became increasingly dark and nihilistic. Perhaps fuelled by Rockstar’s outsider status (Dan Houser is English, and Rockstar’s primary development studio is located in Scotland), Grand Theft Auto took bigger and heavier swings at a country that could be perceived to be embarrassing itself on the global stage.

For Grand Theft Auto 4, the target was the fallacy of the American Dream as seen through the eyes of an immigrant. “The reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t,” read the back-of-the-box synopsis.

That line was echoed in-game by Liberty City’s Statue of Happiness. In the real New York City, the towering Statue of Liberty – guiding torch in hand – was meant to symbolise a brighter future for arriving migrants. But GTA’s perverse reflection, bearing not a torch but a disposable coffee cup, held a tablet that read, “Watch us trick them into wiping rich people’s asses, while we convince them it’s a land of opportunity.” The verse lays clear GTA 4’s seething disdain for this home of capitalist brutality.

If the 3D era said that America is weird, then GTA 4 said that it is weird and hateful. That it is dangerous, deceitful, and debased. The radio waves were filled with the rantings of right-wing reporters on the Fox-lampooning Weazel News, who connected labour unions to terrorism, alongside elitist lefties seeking public adoration for their ‘progressive’ actions on talk shows. Between those shows was the now-staple tidal wave of product adverts, the billboards for which could be seen on every spare wall of Rockstar’s most detailed, expensive city to date.

The satire didn’t just exist in the set-dressing and peripheries, though. This time the satire fuelled the text itself, resulting in a much more serious tone. The way Dan Houser and the writing team painted GTA 4’s characters truly showed their disdain for what rampant capitalism and irresponsible government had done to the so-called greatest city in the world. Playboy X, once a booksmart kid, couldn’t escape the pull of the drug trade that plagued Liberty City’s deprived, largely POC-populated boroughs. Elizabeta Torres, a Puerto Rican immigrant, grew up on those streets, too, which moulded her into a dangerous drug baron fighting for every last dollar. And Manny Escuela, a former heroin addict, attempted to clean up the streets, but became consumed by a superficial desire for fame. There’s tragedy in every cast member – even those not dragged into the crime business, such as the practically evangelised Kate McCreary, are gunned down by it.

The stage for this tragedy was painted in the hues of sewage. Grand Theft Auto 4’s colour palette ranged from grey to brown, to a shade of green so putrid you can practically smell it. It was drawn as such because that’s how protagonist Niko Bellic sees Liberty City; the American Dream he hoped to find is instead a place where the ‘Jingoism Act’ allows for mass citizen surveillance, demands constant patriotism, and prohibits flag burning.

Those grotesque colours faded for 2013’s Grand Theft Auto 5, but the nihilism didn’t. Each of its central characters was written to dig the knife into a trio of American cultures, with little interest in making them sympathetic. Michael DeSanta, an ex-bank robber wallowing in the wealth of his career, is an angry, self-centred scumbag. His wife and daughter are vapid Kardashian-types, while his son is a toxic layabout. Together, they paint an ugly picture of America’s monied, privileged class. In opposition is Trevor Phillips, Michael’s loose cannon of a former partner. While Trevor is technically something of a psychopathic anarchist, his aggressive and thoughtless behaviour echoed so-called ‘trailer trash’ and the uneducated underclass that would, in the years following GTA 5’s release, be so often blamed for propping up the cult of ‘Make America Great Again’. Stuck between them was Franklin Clinton, a small-time criminal wrapped up in violent gang culture whose primary ambition is to climb the criminal ladder.

The trio were the lens through which a stranger picture of America was filmed. GTA 4’s anger had transformed into something of a bemused, almost defeated shrug. There were still a number of fun jabs at contemporary issues – it was easy to find catharsis in tech billionaire Jay Norris, a social media baron grown fat on user data, exploding in front of the press. And Fame or Shame reflected on a decade of reality TV that exploited members of the public, while also poking fun at the status-chasing nature of the people who take part. But, for the most part, GTA 5 continued its usual schtick with little significantly new to say. Weazel News kept up its right-wing media spin, talk shows platformed Democrats with unrealistic policies, and wall-to-wall commercials continued to mock the country’s never-ending unethical capitalism. The message, it seemed, was ‘This is what America was, is, and will continue to be.’

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 suggests that the Rockstar view on America hasn’t significantly changed. Its billboards feature similar jokes, Weazel News is still in business, and filthy money still makes the hedonistic world go round. The Tiktok-like videos of its Florida Men suggest the developer has finally caught up with the significant impact social media has had on the world, and it’s likely GTA 6 will comment on the hunger for never ending viral content, the people we exploit to make that content, and how that’s warped our view of our society. But that’s not a far cry from what the series has explored before. So the real question is, how will Rockstar approach comedic commentary in a world that its own former head writer claimed is sometimes “beyond satire”?

There is reason to expect Rockstar to adopt a more shrewd targeting lens this time around, putting Florida’s ‘anti-woke’ attitude in its sights. A 2022 Bloomberg report claimed that the studio’s ‘frat boy’ culture had been cleaned up, and theorised that the tone of Grand Theft Auto 6 could be notably different to its predecessor. And so it may be that Rockstar’s historic ‘equal opportunities satire’, which punched down at minorities with the same fist it used for politicians and CEOs, is a thing of the past. And if that does come to pass, hopefully the nihilism that fuelled GTA 5 will evaporate and be replaced with a more hopeful, reinvigorated sense of humour that’s willing to stand up to the ugliest corners of American society.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.