Creating a timely satire can be tough when development takes half a decade or more - it's the reason South Park's stuck with its crude art style for literal decades, but the developers of GTA 6 can't just replace their world-class tech with paper cutouts. Instead, the team simply tried to avoid trends that would become outdated come launch.

"We work on it for years and years," Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, Rupert Humphries, told Love Magazine, "so you need to make content that will feel vital to the moment of release. If there's a trend blowing up for six months, you need to see it for what it is and not jump on the bandwagon." While South Park can centre an entire episode on demonic Labubus and squeeze out some laughs while they're still hot, GTA doesn't quite have the same luxury.

Rather than betting on memes that expired years ago, Rockstar leaned into "things that interested us, like conspiracy theories," Humphries added. "The strange ways the public reacts to everyday occurrences, and those are the kinds of things we ran with. In most cases, rather than trying to put a like-for-like of something real in the world, we have created our own slanted, overblown versions, be that a conspiracy theory, or another universal contemporary phenomenon."

Grand Theft Auto's always been a darkly satirical series, but it frequently tackles tougher subjects too. One notable constant is how the series deals with the American Dream and how the public's attitude toward the American Dream has shifted through the years.

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