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In the newest Grand Theft Auto installment—13 years and estimated billions of dollars in the making—people in a fictionalized version of Florida can exercise, drink smoothies, pet their dog, go to the club, and so much more. The main characters are in a relationship, and players will have to tend to that too. Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel talks with the gaming journalist Chris Plante about why the details of this game matter, the controversies it may unleash, the weirdest things he’s seen happen in the game, and what Grand Theft Auto tells us about America in 2026.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Charlie Warzel: Is there a possibility that you can’t make a game for everyone in 2026?
Chris Plante: I think it’s like saying the NFL season might not land this year because people are worried about CTE, or people are worried about people kneeling in the end zone. Like there’s always those things that people say, like: This is it; this is the year that I don’t watch it. And then it’s the biggest season ever for the NFL.
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re gonna be talking about what is poised to be the biggest, most expensive, and arguably most controversial piece of culture and entertainment in recent memory. It is an event that is 13 years in the making. Yes, we’re talking about Grand Theft Auto VI.
Now, you might not be a video-game person, but chances are you know about Grand Theft Auto. And maybe that’s because you’ve played some version since 2001, when Rockstar, the studio that makes the franchise, released GTA 3, which was the first version of the game to turn what was a small-budget carjacking game into a cinematic, 3-D, open-world experience.
Or maybe you’ve sat on the couch and you’ve watched with either glee or horror as somebody else—your partner, your child, your friend—went on a brutal crime spree, getting chased around the city by fleets of police cars and helicopters. Or maybe you know the game through its controversies. To list a few: There’s been outrage over cop killing; the way that the game has depicted sex workers; the fact that sex workers are in the game at all; depictions of torture; celebrities claiming their likenesses have been used; and, of course, the concerns that the game could lead to real-world violence.
But no matter what your experience, Grand Theft Auto is something else, too. For 25 years now, the franchise has been more than a video game. It is one of the most ambitious works of digital art and storytelling that we have. The series has inspired copycats, but it’s also expanded the bounds of what is possible in the gaming format. Each iteration has not only expanded the length of the game, but the size of the world and the scope of the story. Rockstar’s attention to detail in the game—stuff like, after being discharged from the hospital, characters will have cuts and bruises. That’s become a meme unto itself. The series actually seems locked in its own cycle of one-upsmanship, which has moved beyond a video game and into something that feels like its own metaverse.
This game, which will take place in a fictional version of Florida, will supposedly allow people to play in a vast portion of the state, all the way from the quays up into the swamps. Now the GTA phenomenon is also borne out in the economics. GTA 5, which came out in 2013, is still selling like crazy. And it is, depending on which ranking you’re reading, it’s in the top three best-selling games of all time, next to huge online games like Minecraft or Tetris. GTA 6, which is slated to come out November 19th, is estimated to have cost Rockstar in the billions of dollars to make, and it will be the most anticipated game of all time.
And so my guest today is someone who can put all of this into perspective. Chris Plante is the co-founder of Polygon, the gaming website. He’s the host of The Besties and Post Games, two excellent and different podcasts about video games and gaming. Chris has been writing and covering this industry for 20 years, but what I appreciate about his work is that he has this keen eye for the way that this industry interacts with, but also drives, popular culture. So is the world ready for GTA 6? In a world that is almost devoid of monocultural events, can Grand Theft Auto deliver on that promise? Can a series that has satirized America, often pretty savagely, take on [Donald] Trump’s America and Florida without making everyone mad or insane? GTA is now an American institution. But the question remains: Can any institution really survive in 2026?
Chris Plante joins me now to talk about all of it. Chris, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Chris Plante: I’m so happy to be here. This is wonderful.
Warzel: I’m glad. That’s the energy we want to bring here. Okay. So we’re here because Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out soon. And you know, it feels like there are so many things, serious things, happening in the world right now, such that I think the release of this game is gonna sneak up on people. Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say about a game that people have been anticipating for about a decade, but like seriously for about like four years. And yet I still think it’s going to sneak up on people. But my working theory is that Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be one of the biggest cultural events of the decade. Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I crazy? Talk to me.
Plante: It’s the closest thing we have to a guarantee in popular mainstream media, outside of when Avengers: Endgame came out that first time. But this game will be huge, because the one that came out right before this—you know, over a decade ago—it’s still selling about 5 million copies a quarter.
Warzel: Wow.
Plante: So if that’s where it’s at right now, you can count on this one being—I mean, there’s nothing else like it.
Warzel: So you’ve written that Grand Theft Auto is the biggest franchise in the world because of the tiny details. Unpack that broader theory there for me.
Plante: This game kind of began, and in some ways launched, this era of video games as big open worlds. There are things that came before it, but it really established that idea of a video game that you could get lost in. That it’s not just levels anymore; that when you go to New York City, it looks and feels like New York City. When you go to—in the version of New York City from Grand Theft Auto, nearly 15 or however many years ago, you can go to Brooklyn. Like, there are not walls around this. And over the years, they have put all the money from all their success into making those worlds feel more and more realistic, to the point that you can get drunk and go driving in the video game.
It’s not just stealing cars; you can commit all sorts of horrible crimes. But you can also do things that aren’t crimes at all. You can do yoga; you can go play tennis; you can call people on your cellphone or just flip around through its various apps. It is all about this sense of immersion. So I think when people who don’t play these games think about Grand Theft Auto, they think of the immediate—you steal cars, you shoot innocent people, you fight the police, that’s the game. When, in reality, what people like about these games—over the course of the dozens, if not hundreds of hours, if not thousands of hours they play them—is just getting lost in these worlds.
Warzel: Take me back, just for a second, to: Grand Theft Auto III comes out in 2001. I was just looking this up. I was actually kind of blown away by the fact that it was like a couple of weeks after 9/11. So that’s just like a—
Plante: Yeah, it actually got delayed because of 9/11. And they removed things from it because of that.
Warzel: What did they remove?
Plante: They changed the look of the police cars, because they looked too much like New York cop cars. They changed the flight patterns of the planes in the game. It’s been kind of this generator of its own little controversies, its proximity to that event.
Warzel: Yeah, and I want to get to some of those controversies in a second. But going back to, okay: So this thing comes out. GTA, there’s 1 and 2. But then 3 comes out, and it is 3-D, and it’s this immersive-world thing that you’re talking about. And I think that this is just important context to set us up here for the rest of the discussion, but: What do you remember, just as a person, as a person interested in video games, when this came out?
Like, was this orders of magnitude different than the other open worlds that you’d experience? Was it just different in terms of what you could do, or the presentation, or the sort of aggressive violence? What was it that sort of broke your mind open when this launched way back then?
Plante: Yeah. It’s okay, what everybody has to do if you’re thinking about this game launching is forget everything that you know about what a video game does now. Because the things that were amazing then and were really amazing seem so quaint right now. So this is—you could drive around a 3-D version of New York. The previous versions were 2-D, bird’s-eye views of a car.
You could go around, and your car could go up and down hills. And I know that sounds so boring. But a lot, if not all, of 3-D open-world games at this time were on these flat surfaces. And it made the worlds feel fake. They felt very artificial. And here is a world where the buildings broadly looked different from one another. It wasn’t just like a cookie cutter. You could go up and down. You saw a moon give way to a sun. There was a day-night cycle. There was a radio where each car might be listening to a different radio station. So when you stole a luxury car and it was playing opera, you felt like you were stealing it from a person and not just that yet another copy of the same thing, right? All of those little details. Plus, they actually had some celebrity actors; it didn’t feel like anything that you would have seen to that point. And you could see it in the previews at the time. People thought: This is, like, borderline reality. They’ve done it.
Warzel: I remember. I mean, I did actually play some of the 2-D games. And, like, the series always had those radio stations—but I remember when I first played it, that thing with the radio stations is so very visceral and real. Like there was personality behind all of these things that before were just completely formulaic or one note. And this game, GTA 6, is going to be orders of magnitude bigger than the others. What can we expect here?
Plante: It’s everything. I mean, that’s how it’s gonna feel at first. It is what you will have to find over the course of time playing this game is, like, what’s not here, right? And we actually know some things that will not be there. We know that references to Donald Trump will not be there. We know that references to the pandemic will not be there. They’ve said this much. Which is deeply strange, because this is a game set in Florida. What you’re gonna find in it is a story of a Bonnie and Clyde who are, you know, avoiding the cops, committing a heist, and then.
Warzel: Yeah.
Plante: Also just like living their life. Like going to the club, going exercising, getting food. I believe in this game you’re going to be able to exercise and your body will actually show muscle. Or you’ll eat at meals, and you might gain or lose weight. These are obviously quite artificial. It’s not as realistic as that sounds. But it’s—they want you to have that experience of being the person who commits highest.
Warzel: Yeah.
Plante: Yeah. The 99 percent of the time that they’re not actually committing a heist.
Warzel: Yeah, there’s a quote from this long New York Times preview about the game that has this immersiveness. I’m just gonna read it here for people, which is: “Here I am, eating an apple, opening the fridge, and drinking a smoothie. So this will increase my health temporarily for a while, allowing people to sort of role-play. And then, exiting the apartment, the character steps down to pet a pedestrian’s dog.”
The person from Rockstar who makes the game, who’s talking to the writer of the piece, says that you could buy pet snacks from the convenience stores and dole them out if you wish to the dog. There’s been a lot of online fascination with the ability to like, to have a pet, a canine companion. I mean, this level of granularity—talk to me about this.
Plante: Yeah. What’s weird about that thing you just said, though, is like all of that stuff exists in tons of games. Like the idea that you can pet a dog; there’s a Twitter account that’s dedicated to games you can pet a dog in. The idea of eating food, and then you get a health increase—I mean that’s like Mario. What’s so unusual about this game is that they have put so much money and so much resource into animating it so that you see all of it seamlessly. Where in a lot of games, you know, like you pick up a health item and maybe like a little sparkle happens over your head and you see the bar rays at the top. Where here, it’s like: Okay, you pick up the item and then they unwrap it. And then they put it in their mouth, and we actually see the food get masticated and get swallowed and their stomachs adjust. And all of that time and resources it gets back to what you said of the little details. That you’re doing things that you do in tons of video games—you’re just doing it in a way that it looks like a movie, that it looks consistent perpetually. And it’s not stopping to just say a little number goes up.
Warzel: And it also feels like—inside this world, aside of just the options for things that you’re going to be able to do, there’s a like what you’re speaking to. Like the animations; there are, I think, like over 600,000 non-playable character animations. I think, to people who don’t play video games, there’s a little—like I mean, people know now, “NPC” has become like a thing people say. Derogatorily. But like, what does it mean to have, you know, 600,000 non-playable character animations?
Plante: Yeah, it’s a little unhinged. Like, it’s detached from reality. And it’s certainly detached from the rest of video-game reality. Nobody can afford to do this but Rockstar, the people who are making this game. Nobody has another, the previous game continuing to bring in, you know, 5 million copies a quarter, to just inflate your pool of cash. They also have an online mode that is also bringing in money constantly.
So because of that—and because they know that’s what people expect from their games—they can put money into these animations. That a single animation could take somebody who knows how long. These are not things that you just do in an afternoon. And you can have people who are dedicated just to, let’s say, walking animations for these pedestrians. You could have people who are dedicated to just trees and shrubbery and nature. All of these individual details can have people assigned to them. And the staffing, it’s in the thousands. I mean it’s about as many people who work on a Marvel movie. I believe it was 4,000 people for GTA 6. Like, that is so many people working so long over such tiny details.
Warzel: Mm-hmm. So is this going too far? Do people want this? Like, do they actually want this? I know, as a thought experiment, if you’re Rockstar, you’re one-upping yourself every time. There’s a lot of expectations that this has to be amazing. Do people really want to be walking their dogs or exercising to avoid gaining weight, doing the things that we do here in the world and grumble about? Like, is this gonna be too onerous for people?
Plante: I don’t think it will be for this game. I think the problem is bigger than this game. It’s the video-game market, which thinks, Well, this is a success, so we should have 50 more of these. And the answer is in fact no. We should not have 50 more of these. It’s, again, the Marvel comparison—that you see Endgame and you’re like, You know what we need? We need an Endgame. And it’s like, Well, there’s only so many of those, ’cause they take up so much time.
So yeah, there are a lot of people, who maybe play one or two games a year, who are going to love that this game does all of the stuff that we’re talking about, and more. And they’re gonna love it so much that it’s gonna be the only thing they play. And that’ll be a large percentage of the audience. Like, I guess more than half of people who play video games are not playing games that came out this year. You kind of lock into what you love.
And I think this serves that very mainstream portion of the video-game audience. Do I think every game should be this? Absolutely not. That would be such a colossal waste of artistry and human resources and time.
Warzel: I imagine the people who are listening to this are much more generalist in terms of this, in terms of like the specifics of gaming. And I think there’s probably a large portion of people out there who just see the Grand Theft Auto series as these static releases, right? Who don’t understand that there is this constant—both economy but also culture—that is being created and tended to throughout the years. I saw, you know, the report a while back that there was a production of Hamlet being staged in an online version of GTA.
What happens—like, what cultures are being built inside the online version of this game? And how has that sort of changed the franchise?
Plante: Yeah, it’s kind of: How many layers deep do you want to go? Because the first layer is this online mode. With Grand Theft Auto V, they also released Grand Theft Auto online. It lets you go around that game’s version of L.A. and Southern California, but do it with friends and complete different quests, and they kept updating it with stuff that, hey, if you wanted, you could pay a little bit more money for each month and just keep giving Rockstar money over and over and over again. That was a tremendous success for them. A lot of people loved it after a rocky launch. Then players started role-playing in the virtual world. And if any of your listeners are familiar with LARPing—I’m really feeling like I’m the dorkiest person somehow to be on an already somewhat-dorky show.
Warzel: No, lean in. Lean in, Chris.
Plante: When you think of LARPing, it’s live-action role-playing. It’s, you know, Ren Fest type of stuff. This is people going into the world of Grand Theft Auto and creating their own rules and their own modifications to the game’s, like, actual code to make it a place where you can do the things that are not what you do in Grand Theft Auto. You could be a police officer, which is the opposite. You could be somebody who just runs a restaurant. You could be a journalist in it and actually write up stories about what is happening in Grand Theft Auto? You can get arrested in this version and then have to wait out your time in jail, or maybe somebody breaks you out.
It is very much a true role-play—not like a role-playing game, just a role-play experience. And it has become so popular that Rockstar itself is partnered with one of these. They recognize this and want to foster this community.
Warzel: You’ve listed off a few things, but is there anything that comes to mind as like the weirdest stuff you’ve heard of happening?
Plante: The weirdest stuff for me is more that people modify the game to just do all sorts of things it’s not meant to do. And then people will try to play through the game in these completely broken ways. And by that I mean they have made versions of the game where every car in the world is going, I think it’s like 400 miles per hour, no matter what, at all times. And then you see somebody trying to get through just a single mission when the roads are filled with 400-mile-per hour cars. They made a version where there are hundreds of airplanes that fall out of the sky every 30 seconds. They made another version where you teleport every 50 seconds. So teleporting in this, I would be like teleporting from Vegas to Santa Ana. Like, a real inconvenience.
And people love this stuff. They love taking this world and breaking it. And I think that, for me, is really why these games last. Because you create this hyper-real world, and then you let people be gods with it and set their own rules to the physics and to the logic. And that’s where like the internet memes come; that’s where the Twitch streams come, that’s where the YouTube stuff comes. And that is like—that’s why the game lasts.
Warzel: And not to be all like, you know, galaxy-brained about it, but a problem with a lot of technology is that people build these things painstakingly, whether it’s a platform or whatever, and feel like they have an understanding of how the world is going to receive it. There’s an idealized way that the world must experience this. And I think a little of what is great, if we’re gonna give Rockstar a little bit of credit for this, is their understanding that the world is going to come into this thing and receive it completely differently and break it.
Plante: Absolutely.
Warzel: Like, that’s what people do with technology, right? They use it in unexpected ways. And so I think that this is a really fascinating example of this. The other thing that I think about is, you know, Facebook changed its company name and hard-pivoted and spent billions and billions of dollars on a metaverse that no one wanted. And yet there’s just, like, all these people, you know, running restaurants and being journalists in Grand Theft Auto V online. It’s like there is a metaverse. Metaverses do exist, and there are people in them. It’s just not the ones where you’re gonna have a meeting and, you know, not have legs.
I want to talk a little bit about controversies in this game. Because Grand Theft Auto is a series that has always been very controversial. There’s a few that have percolated. There’s gonna be more specifically surrounding the fact that you said there’s this Bonnie-and-Clyde style of protagonists. They’re a couple, and you have to ideally attend to their relationship and keep each side happy. Some of the articles that I’ve seen have shared these social-media posts from people who are arguing that simply playing the game is cheating on your spouse, if you have a spouse. What do you make of a controversy like that?
Plante: Yeah. I think it’s incredible how we’ve gotten to real controversies meaning so little and fake controversies meaning so much. And by that I mean—when the original Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels came out, right, these games would be trotted out before Congress. I mean, these were really serious issues. There were Supreme Court cases that decided the future of games as a medium, in part reacting to these video games. And then after that—and it’s gotten more and more and more—the controversies around this game become meaningless. Like, you can do some truly heinous things in this game. And I’m happy to list them out.
Warzel: Yeah. List a few out.
Plante: And yet the thing that people are worried about is like this, right? It’s like there is leaked footage of this game that came out, where you saw someone just slaughter multiple police officers, and then also stab to death many unhoused people living under a highway. And it was just a normal sequence in this game. And it’s almost old hat. At this point people are like: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been, you know, killing people like that forever in these video games. Now, you having a relationship—that seems pretty naughty. I don’t know. It’s like, everybody wants a piece of it for their SEO or to be part of a conversation. And so we get these very bizarre controversies that feel half-hearted, like from the drop.
Warzel: Well, what I think is interesting, though, is the way that this kind of mundane, “you have to manage a relationship” controversy. The way it’s come into the culture, though, I think speaks more to the culture, right? I don’t know if I fully agree that it’s, like, just people trying to grab a little SEO. Because I think it’s actual anxieties about what has happened both to gaming and to men and to online life and alienation and whatever, in between the time that something like GTA 3 came out in 2001 and 2026, right? Like this idea of people being worried about a digital relationship usurping another one—it seems to speak more to me about cultural anxieties of, like, what this game is going to give to an either disaffected or introverted kind of style of dude, or woman, or whomever, right?
Plante: Yes. That’s so interesting to me. Because I would’ve put it as—this speaks to our general prudishness, of the fact that someone kissing in a movie is now seen as kind of shocking if it’s like a romantic or sensual kiss, versus even in like the ’90s. But what you’re saying sounds right. I guess I wasn’t seeing that, because we’ve already started to see the hard-right reaction to the game, which is: It might be woke. I need to assert my anti-woke bona fides right now and let you know that, like, this has bisexual lighting on its cover art, and therefore I won’t be playing it.
I think that we might—and maybe already are starting to—see a bit of what happened around The Odyssey. That the really hard-right part of the internet only has one way of reacting to mass-cultural things, which is: It must be woke. It’s big, it’s mainstream. And then they push against it. So I agree with what you’re saying.
At the same time, I also feel like there will be a part of the kind of, like—the saddest men on the internet, who will turn against this game simply because it is part of pop culture. And because you play as a woman of color in it. And like, that has been enough for people to get very mad on the internet, when it comes to their video games.
Warzel: If you had to predict a couple of these outrages, what do we think? I mean, we’ve got, right—this takes place in a facsimile of Florida. Not veiled at all, but there’s a lot of Florida Man in there, right? Like the meme stereotype of the Florida Man—you know, kind of rednecky, “doing crazy things” stereotype. So I gotta imagine there’s something there. Like you said, the person of color. How do you think, practically, this is gonna slot into the culture wars?
Plante: Yo, every which way. Every group will have an opportunity to be mad about this game if they so want it. And so it will be on you, dear listener, to decide whether you want to be riled up. By that I mean, like—there is the violence against police officers. There is the depiction of Miami as a dangerous place full of criminals, which the local leadership of every city that a GTA is in gets very upset about. There is going to be questions about naked bodies. There is a lot of nudity, we believe, in this video game. Both male and female, something that is not super common in video games and certainly not common in mainstream media. And those bodies are not just like “sexy bodies.” They are very natural bodies. And I think that will cause some issues.
Warzel: Let’s talk a little bit about how this game is influenced, right? There’s a quote from that Times article that says the players will be able to learn about the world of Grand Theft Auto VI through an in-game feed known as Snapmatic, on which influencers, celebrities, friends of [the main characters] Jason and Lucia will share photos and videos. Now it’s early, clearly. But what are you seeing in terms of how social media and the internet have imprinted on this game’s development?
Plante: I think each one of these Grand Theft Auto games, if you’ll find a very quick trip to the past, is influenced by whatever the culture is at that time. Or at least what its creators see as the dominant culture. The Houser brothers—who didn’t create Grand Theft Auto but have led it, especially since Grand Theft Auto III—they came up in the music scene. They wanted to run Rockstar like a record label. And the first GTA 3, we talked about music; it is a game very much influenced by music. Grand Theft Auto IV is a game very much influenced by the mob movies of the ’80s and the ’90s; of film, of cinema. Grand Theft Auto V is a game very much about the internet and kind of the beginning of smartphones. It is a game where you finally have apps. You can pull out your phone; you can take pictures.
And I think that this game is going to be one very much influenced by short-form media and social media. That is where they are pulling a lot of their anxiety, a lot of their humor. These are ultimately games about the American experience through the eyes of two brothers who were born in London and kind of born into artistic royalty in London. But they have a lot of thoughts about America, and so do their writing teams. And I think because of that, yes. But we are going to look through it through the lens of our time—or at least of 2018 to 2020, when this game really began development.
Warzel: You talking about the Houser brothers being, you know, not from the States and this idea of wanting to tell the American story. But through the lens of kind of “an outsider telling the insider story.” And at the same time, it seems like every time we get that reflection, like Americans are kinda giddy for that—to be perceived by somebody else in this satirical way. Why do you think we love these portrayals? Which I have to say, in all the Grand Theft Auto elements—they’re not that flattering.
Plante: No, they’re not at all. This game will be a little different. We can get to that. But I think people like to see their enemies bullied. I think that is a sad reality of the United States. And I think that this game is happy to oblige in the way that South Park is, too, right? Like, we’re going to say it. And there are gonna be things that you will hear in these games that you don’t like, and there are gonna be things that you’re like, That’s pretty funny. Like, that is the type of person that I despise, and look at them being portrayed in the worst way possible. I think that’s part of it.
But I think the other part of it is: The story does disappear. Like, you play this game for the 30 or 40 or however many hours that you’re gonna play it, and you see all the silly billboards that are like weird puns about how shitty America is, and that’s all there.
And then you play for another 40 hours over the next, I don’t know, decade. And that all fades. And suddenly what you’re left with is actually an exceptionally beautiful ode to America as like a space. And its natural beauty is portrayed in these games. The architecture is so lovingly made. The people in the games that are not in these stories are so human. Like I said, you’re gonna see naked bodies in a video game that look like people, and are just out in the world having a nice time. And for all of its cynicism, I think ultimately what really sticks people around these is the rest of the stuff. The stuff that would keep you in a role-play, right? You’re not gonna stick around in a role-play of these games, or an online world, because you hate it there. Maybe that brings you in, but it’s certainly not what locks you in.
Warzel: You mentioned that there’s a part that like we’re not gonna get. Were you alluding to the fact that the politics is a little bit diluted? Or you know, purposefully so?
Plante: So I think two things. The one, the Houser brothers; this will be the first game without, I believe, Dan Houser working on it. I believe he left at some stage of the development. And I think that they have shifted over control in some of the narrative ambition to fresh talent. And I think also, maybe they’ve finally caught on that their Gen X humor has worn out its welcome. I think, you know, once you get two generations removed, you are able to look into the mirror and be like, yeah: Gen Z kids are not gonna wanna hear me, you know, make jokes about Pearl Jam and make shitty jokes about pronouns.
And I think that they had not caught that yet with GTA 5. I think that was a game it almost felt, at times, like where they maybe started to realize it halfway through, and it was too late to pull back some of the stuff that they were doing. And now the question that I have for the series is, what are you? Like if you aren’t South Park anymore, and you aren’t going to make this? And they’ve said as much. They said, you won’t be seeing— like, not every brand label is gonna be some crummy joke. Not everything you hear on the radio station is going to be, like, a parody about America. There is more going on here. Well then, what is it? Because ultimately they do have a story that they want to tell. They do have feelings that they want you to feel. And I think that they want to make something honestly more hopeful, which we’ll see. I mean, this is still a game that, like, I think the opening of the Netflix preview was somebody yelling, Crackheads are here. So like they’re still doing their thing. But I don’t know.
Warzel: What this makes me wonder is: So much has changed since in the media environment. In politics—but just in the world in general—in the space between the last Grand Theft Auto and this one, right? It’s not just the amount of time that’s lapsed. It’s like the acceleration of culture. It’s the difference between different generations, right? And their experiences. And I just am wondering—do you think that there’s a chance that this could just not land? Like, all of these have landed in part because it’s felt like the world has been just, like, a little bit more monocultural in each one of these. And maybe getting less and less and less as the internet accelerates and everything.
But now we’re in this place where everyone’s experience of the world is so completely different. It is so—whatever your information bubble is, or whatever your politics are, whatever your niche thing. Or, you know, the experience of someone in Gen Z is so much different than someone who’s coming in Gen X. Or you know, a Boomer or whatever.
Like—is there a possibility that you can’t make a game for everyone in 2026?
Plante: I think it’s like saying the NFL season might not land this year, because people are worried about CTE. Or people are worried about people kneeling in the endzone. Like there’s always those things that people say. Like: This is it; this is the year that I don’t watch it. And then it’s the biggest season ever for the NFL. I think this is just one of those truly weird cultural forces that is so big that it’s genuinely hard for me to imagine it failing in any significant way, barring I don’t even know what. Like, it would truly have to have something, I think, very explicit politically for it to be that big of a disaster, right?
Like, if there was a mission about Donald Trump. If there was a mission about Charlie Kirk. Like, those are the things where I think you could maybe start to see it. But this is again—when it’s making this much money, I’m sure that they have dotted every I and crossed every T. To make this feel like it has teeth, but also to make sure that there’s nothing in here that is going to even remotely run the risk of kicking the real hornets’ nest.
Warzel: As the game then comes out in the real world, let’s say it kind of is failure proof in some ways. We do need metrics to judge its success, right? Like, what are the things you’ll be looking at in terms of judging that? People are obviously gonna play it, but what does success mean for a game that is this big? How do we really evaluate it?
Plante: So they’re going to be very careful with how they roll this out, and how they continue to have those numbers go up. They’ve already laid the groundwork for that here. So this game is going to come out on PlayStation 5, an Xbox—Series X, S, whatever—this fall. And then a PC version is going to come out sometime next year. And presumably, and then an online mode is going to come out. And by the time we get past that, the new Xbox and PlayStation will probably be out. So then they’ll release it again for that. And it’ll have all the graphical upgrades everybody wanted to run on PC.
This thing, to be clear, I don’t know how it’s even gonna run on modern hardware. I feel like you’re gonna have to play with your headphones on, with the volume up, because your machine’s gonna be overheating. But each of those opportunities, right, is just another opportunity to get a sale. So when you see that GTA 5 has 230 million copies sold, that’s not 230 million people who went and bought the game. That is many people who have bought that game multiple times. That is that game being offered as a bonus as part of maybe a Netflix subscription, or something like that. I don’t know if it’s Netflix that did that, but I think Sony or Xbox did at certain points. There are ways to just continue to get this game in front of people over the course of a decade, really.
Warzel: It feels like there’s actually been some backlash that I have seen about that. People are already frustrated with Rockstar with this. There is the sort of like: Why don’t you just release it for everything right away, right? Like, why are you not allowing certain people to do that?
There’s also—I don’t believe there’s a physical copy of the game. It’s all gonna be digital, to which people are saying, Of course, here we go. This is how you charge me 12 times for this thing, right?
Plante: I mean, this is a fair thing to be concerned about. But it’s a much bigger issue than this game and I think, weirdly, Rockstar got lucky in a grim way. Because Sony PlayStation came out shortly after this saying: Actually, we’re not planning to do discs for any of our games in the future. And suddenly that conversation shifted.
Warzel: But you know, in general, I think the top line here is that there are people who are frustrated with Rockstar right now. There’s also been some issues with Rockstar of alleged union busting. They sort of strenuously deny this, but there were I think it was like 30 or more employees who were fired; I think they were participating in a Slack that may have had something to do with unionizing. Rockstar did strenuously deny this.
Plante: Yeah.
Warzel: What’s going on right now though, in terms of the perception of the company with all of this stuff swirling around in advance of obviously their biggest release ever?
Plante: So this is what I’m curious about when the release actually hits. Because I don’t think this stuff has hit the kind of mainstream conversation yet. And you’re right. I think it was 31 people dismissed in October 2025; claims of gross misconduct for sharing information in places that were not approved by the company. That was a Discord that was being used, too, and I think the team was hoping to create a union—very much still getting processed through the U.K. system, right? It seems not great.
I don’t think those stories happen on the mainstream spaces until the game is out, and suddenly CNBC needs something to talk about. What’s their angle? Fox Business needs something to talk about; what’s their angle? And suddenly every angle gets brought in, and all these controversies that are largely living right now in forums and on video-game websites are gonna become fodder for the larger media ecosystem. And I think that is what we might see around this game at its launch. I think some of these controversies around: Hey, wait; you don’t even get to own the game, as I understood it? What’s up with that? Hey, you maybe busted a union, or at least that’s what people are claiming. What is up with that?
And those things also tie into these much bigger stories of what’s happening in games in general. Unions is the anxiety around an industry in which layoffs happen seemingly every day. And they are massive amounts of layoffs. And those things are about—I don’t know. It feels like they’re just about to hammer together in a way that games culture just has not had the opportunity to be in front of the microphone within a very long time.
Warzel: Well, and then add to that the avalanche of the cultural, political, whatever controversies that are coming in the game, right? The culture-war thing. I mean, it seems to me like that will also hit and create this kind of perfect storm. If you had to guess, what are your odds that either via Truth Social, or in some other format, that Donald Trump mentions GTA VI?
Plante: Yeah. There’s again—I wouldn’t even. There’s no bet.
Warzel: There’s no bet.
Plante: He will. Like, there will be an AI-generated Grand Theft Auto VI post on Truth Social at least shared by the president before the end of November. I would liquidate everything I have if you gave me that bet.
Warzel: Don’t do that.
Plante: It would be the easiest bet there will be. Because that’s the other thing. Is—this administration loves using video games as part of their kind of, I don’t know, propaganda cudgel. They have been doing this with everything from Halo to Tetris. And nobody’s really in a position to hold them accountable for it, because people know what happens if you try.
Warzel: I am curious if Donald Trump will actually clock this. I personally, I do think you’re right that this administration loves to use games and also just anything that’s in popular culture. I think as I’m talking about this, I’m genuinely not prepared for the amount of reenactment-style things that are going to happen. We’re kinda coming off the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the stuff—like the sort of cynical, awful memes that even people on the right make around this. Like I’m just thinking of like reenactments of all these awful things that have happened in the past 13 years since the last game, and just the ability to do that in a higher-definition thing. I’m not ready.
Plante: Yeah. Can I give you my, like—this is like the bet I wouldn’t make, but a bet that I have stuck in my head.
Warzel: Please.
Plante: Which is: All of this might happen, and probably will happen. Almost certainly, people are gonna use the game to make all these awful things. And it’s gonna be a political minefield, and yada. But, what if—because the election happens like two or three weeks before this game comes out—I think there’s a release that can happen after these things. Where everybody’s like: You know what? Thanksgiving’s coming. Christmas is here. We got through yet another election cycle in America. I just want to play my video games. I don’t wanna see another ad for a politician ever again. I don’t wanna hear about any of this. I don’t wanna talk to my family about it. I don’t want any of it.
And I think that there are a lot of people whom that is going to fall onto right when this game comes out.
And I think that there’s this weird scenario where this game launches, and—let me be clear. I’m not talking about, like, Hands Across America. Like it’s not that, but like where it launches and weirdly it lands kind of softly. That it isn’t seen as all of this, all these controversies. Because people are so burnt out by the time that the election ends that they just want to like, I don’t know, play a cool video game.
Warzel: That’s a really interesting theory. I believe the game comes out November 19.
Plante: Something like that, yeah.
Warzel: There it is coming up—that’s very strategic to put it after an election cycle. It’s also very strategic to put it right before everyone, you know, takes a couple of days off and eats a bunch of turkey and the holiday season. I just saw a thing with the NBA player Steven Adams predicts that the level of play across all sports is gonna plummet after November 19. Just like: No, guys, like we’re gonna be in our hotel room, staying up too late, playing this game. We’re not gonna go to the gym. We’re not gonna practice as much. Obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I think also speaking to the idea that there is this way that it’s gonna—it may be that societal lull if people really are getting sucked into this at the kind of unprecedented level that people are expecting.
Okay, so last question here. You wrote this post on your Substack, the title of which I really like. It’s titled “How to See the Profound Beauty in Gaming’s Tiniest Details.” And in the post you talk about—it’s not just about GTA, clearly. But you talk about getting really mired in the obsessiveness of these very elaborately constructed worlds. And also just kind of delightfully fixating on some of these questions.
One of the two questions that you listed was: Do GTA 5 street signs comply with California law? And what is the oldest building in Grand Theft Auto V? I love this. I love the idea of treating these big worlds with the seriousness of the real world, and thinking about especially the in-game bureaucracy. And so, what questions are you planning to investigate in GTA 6?
Plante: That is such a great question. I should give a shout-out where it’s due. That was an interview with this YouTube creator named Any Austin, who actually goes and figures these things out. Like, What’s the oldest building in Liberty City? And then uses the design of the architecture versus real architecture books and historians to find out the answer. For me, I’m not that patient or that smart.
Ha. But the thing that I love is: How long will it take me to walk from one end of a map to the other? And that is such a great way to see the artistry of a video game like this and actually see all the stuff that is not the, like, shooting people, and the quests, and all the obligations and all the little things that they put in the game to make all the chemicals released in your brain. If you start as far as you can one end of the map of South Florida, I think maybe like in the Keys—whatever they call it in this video game—and you try to get as far north as you can, the sheer amount of stuff that you will see.
You will see obvious things that you will find in Miami. You’ll find clubs and strip clubs and more clubs and high rises and also more clubs. You’ll see all of that, right? But then you’ll also go through a bayou and be able to see crocodiles and people fishing and people jumping off of diving boards and all sorts of bonkers animations. And then you’ll get even further north, and you’ll see versions of the American South. And you’ll see kind of, this almost desiccated sun-scorched landscape from global warming. You’ll see all of this, and all the attention to detail in it, down to the plumbing that is pushing the water through these fake environments. That is what I love.
Because, again, 4,000 people worked on this for nearly a decade. When you think about how much stuff that they made, there’s a very real chance that we will not be seeing some little detail until 10, 15 years from now. If you go and watch the videos by that creator that I mentioned, there are things that he’s seeing that I don’t think anybody has ever bothered to notice because they were simply in a part of the game that there’s no reason to go to. And yet they made it anyway. And that is what I’m really looking forward to.
Warzel: What I love about that is that’s a reminder of the artistry of all this, right? And there’s gonna be this long series of—as we just detailed—controversies and takes about all of it. But at the end of the day, too, it’s a strangely living, breathing work of art and culture.
Chris, hopefully once this thing’s out in the world we could send you out there to go LARP, do some journalism in Grand Theft Auto VI and report back to us to tell us what the oldest building is. Or, I don’t know, uncover a corrupt gambling ring or something. I don’t know what, but we’re gonna put you on the case and have you back to talk about this once it’s entered the world. But thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain. I really appreciate it.
Plante: Thank you so much for having me.
Warzel: So that’s it for us here. A quick reminder: We are doing an “ask me anything” episode with me, Charlie, the host. You can ask me anything, truly. Stuff about the show, stuff about my reporting process, any burning questions about tech, social media, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to. Everything is on the table. I can’t wait to get your questions. You can shoot me an email at charlie at theatlantic.com. Put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in your subject line.
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