Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says there is a purpose the Grand Theft Auto video games are all the time set in US cities: ‘Weapons’

The Grand Theft Auto video games are famed for his or her sprawling recreations of well-known US cities: Liberty Metropolis is New York Metropolis, Vice Metropolis is Miami, Los Santos is Los Angeles. And regardless of being round for almost 30 years now, the sequence has—with one exception, famous additional under—by no means ventured outdoors of American borders. In a current interview with Lex Fridman, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser mentioned there is a good purpose for that: Different international locations could have nice cities, however they are not American cities.

“There is a purpose why GTA saved coming again to Miami, New York, Los Angeles,” Houser mentioned, agreeing with Fridman’s evaluation that Miami’s mix of “shiny floor and a darkish underworld” make it a really perfect goal for satirizing American tradition. “You might transfer it to any of these and it will work.”

Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020 after guiding the tales of the primary 5 GTAs and the Pink Lifeless Redemptions video games, then implied that these cities, presumably together with different main US locales, are the one place it might work. Houser mentioned GTA London 1969, an growth for the unique Grand Theft Auto that got here out in 1999 (and, for the file, was launched for PC in addition to PlayStation), was “fairly cute and enjoyable,” however even again then there was no real interest in going worldwide with a standalone Grand Theft Auto launch.

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“For a full GTA recreation, we all the time determined there was a lot Americana inherent within the IP, it will be actually laborious to make it work in London or wherever else. You wanted weapons, you wanted these larger-than-life characters—it simply felt like the sport was a lot about America, presumably from an outsider’s perspective, however that was a lot about what the factor was that it would not actually have labored in the identical method elsewhere.”

Gun tradition is actually a singular function of the US and it allows a kind of gameplay that would not maintain as much as scrutiny if it was set nearly wherever else, however that is simply a part of the problem. As Houser mentioned, American popular culture as a complete is massively outsized, and for a sequence like GTA that is constructed on skewering these tropes, the US is way and away the deepest nicely from which to attract. The Grand Theft Auto video games, particularly the later ones, are all about dumb, violent spectacle splashed throughout a metaphorical Jumbotron, and for higher or worse—and I say this with the deepest and most honest respect and affection for my US colleagues and buddies—no person serves up that exact mixture like America.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is at the moment slated to come back to PC on Might 26. A PC launch hasn’t been confirmed but.