Grand Theft Auto announces first female protagonist in 25 years

Some news from IGN today, which reports that Grand Theft Auto VI—soon to be the flagship title in Rockstar Games’ long-running crime game series—is set to do something the series hasn’t done in multiple decades: Include a female playable character.

That’s right: GTA VI (currently scheduled for the far-distant and unknowable future, possibly some time in 2023 or 2024) will apparently feature a character who identifies as female as one of its playable characters, for the first time since female characters appeared (from a top-down, barely detailed fashion) in the first, pre-3D Grand Theft Auto games. (And, admittedly, as a customization option in Grand Theft Auto Online.)

This is per a much wider report on Rockstar’s corporate health from Bloomberg, which looked into the studio as it’s reportedly been making strides to distance itself from accusations of “frat-like” corporate culture levied against it back in 2018. (Also: Crippling, 100-hour-week crunch, which is sadly not a problem unique to Rockstar.) Among the revelations of said report: After decades of portraying the adventures of psychopathic, amoral dudes, the latest GTA—which is apparently doing a sort of Bonnie And Clyde thing—will feature a woman as one of its main playable story characters. (The 3D GTA games have often played with multiple perspectives, showing events from a number of playable points of view—which only highlights how bizarre it is that every single one of them to date has been a dude.)

The report itself is optimistic about Rockstar, with one employee calling the studio “a boys’ club transformed into a real company.” It also contains a few drips and drabs of information about Grand Theft Auto VI itself, which the company recently announced it was pivoting to giving its full attention to (after a few years where Online was themajor part of its focus); the game will apparently take place in a “fictionalized Miami”—presumably Vice City, from the 2002 game of the same name. Also: Plans to make the game absolutely massive—as in, continent-sized—have now been pulled back, at least in part so as to not completely bury the creators under crunch.