Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says there's a reason the Grand Theft Auto games are always set in US cities: 'Guns'

The Grand Theft Auto games are famed for their sprawling recreations of famous US cities: Liberty City is New York City, Vice City is Miami, Los Santos is Los Angeles. And despite being around for nearly 30 years now, the series has—with one exception, noted further below—never ventured outside of American borders. In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser said there's a good reason for that: Other countries may have great cities, but they're not American cities.

"There's a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles," Houser said, agreeing with Fridman's assessment that Miami's blend of "glossy surface and a dark underworld" make it an ideal target for satirizing American culture. "You could move it to any of those and it would work."

Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020 after guiding the stories of the first five GTAs and the Red Dead Redemptions games, then implied that those cities, presumably along with other major US locales, are the only place it could work. Houser said GTA London 1969, an expansion for the original Grand Theft Auto that came out in 1999 (and, for the record, was released for PC as well as PlayStation), was "pretty cute and fun," but even back then there was no interest in going international with a standalone Grand Theft Auto release.

"For a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters—it just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider's perspective, but that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn't really have worked in the same way elsewhere."

Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484 - YouTube

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Gun culture is certainly a unique feature of the US and it enables a type of gameplay that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny if it was set virtually anywhere else, but that's just part of the challenge. As Houser said, American pop culture as a whole is massively outsized, and for a series like GTA that's built on skewering those tropes, the US is far and away the deepest well from which to draw. The Grand Theft Auto games, especially the later ones, are all about dumb, violent spectacle splashed across a metaphorical Jumbotron, and for better or worse—and I say this with the deepest and most sincere respect and affection for my US colleagues and friends—nobody serves up that particular combination like America.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently slated to come to consoles on May 26. A PC release hasn't been confirmed yet.

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