rockstar avoided jumping on trends for gta 6, made their own twisted takes instead

Eurogamer has a piece up about how Rockstar approached satire in GTA 6 when the dev cycle is this long. The basic problem is that if you write a joke about some trend in 2021, it's ancient history by the time the game actually ships in November 2026.

South Park gets away with timely stuff because the crude art style lets them crank out episodes fast. Rockstar can't just swap the GTA 6 world for paper cutouts. So the team apparently tried not to jump on bandwagons that would be dead on arrival. Instead they went for their own slanted, overblown versions of whatever they were riffing on.

That feels like the right call to me. GTA's satire has always worked best when it's a warped mirror rather than a direct reference to last week's news. If you make fun of a specific influencer or meme, it ages like milk. If you build a whole fake version of a thing, it can stay funny longer.

I'm curious how that shows up in the actual world. Leonida already looks like a fever dream version of Florida, so maybe the in-game brands and radio stations are all twisted takes on stuff that never really existed. Or maybe they cut a bunch of stuff late in development because it started to feel too dated.

What trends do you think they ended up cutting or twisting into something unrecognizable?

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Source: Eurogamer · Curated content.