Comments by former GTA 6 dev and Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser have resurfaced as evidence of just how much the world can change during increasingly long game development windows.

Back in 2018, Houser told GQ that he was “thankful” that GTA 6 wasn’t releasing during a Donald Trump presidency: “It’s really unclear what we would even do with it, let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did,” he said. “Both intense liberal progression and intense conservatism are both very militant, and very angry. It is scary but it’s also strange, and yet both of them seem occasionally to veer towards the absurd. It’s hard to satirise for those reasons. Some of the stuff you see is straightforwardly beyond satire. It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast.”

Those comments were made six years ago, ahead of the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. That game, set at the turn of the 20th century, didn’t have to deal with modern American politics in anything like the same way that Grand Theft Auto does. Rockstar’s more modern games are steeped in satire of the modern world, but GTA 5 first released in 2013, well before Trump announced his 2016 candidacy. 

As of today, Houser’s take on the good fortune of not releasing his satirical game during a time so “beyond satire” is now definitively out of date. With Trump now President-Elect for a second time and GTA 6 scheduled to launch in 2025, it seems all-but guaranteed that its release will coincide with his presidency. As a result, Houser’s 2018 comments have already been drawing plenty of attention.

Admittedly, Houser doesn’t have to worry all that much about how that satire comes across. The Rockstar co-founder left the company in 2020, and is now working on how own “open-world action-adventure” game at his new studio. There’s a touch of the GTA to that, of course, but Houser’s also pointed to a near-future sci-fi setting for that game, so perhaps he’ll have successfully avoided this particular pitfall. Still, his comments are indicative of a notable trend in game development – projects are now taking so long to complete that history literally has time to repeat itself.

Former GTA 6 dev says Rockstar will currently be trying to “really tighten” the game “in every corner” right now, because “90% of your work” is accounting for players who don’t do as they’re told.