We’re less than one month away from the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, and the world is preparing for what’s bound to be a culturally dominant moment. Sick days are being planned, economists are doom-spiraling, and people are debating whether it’s possible to digitally cheat on your significant other with Lucia. It’s safe to say that it’s going to be a circus, and everyone wants a bit of that pie. That includes The Onion.
The satirical publication has already started to take aim at Rockstar’s open-world crime game over the past few months, with headlines like “Hyperrealistic ‘GTA VI’ Feature Makes Players Serve Out Prison Sentences In Real Time” and “Rockstar Announces ‘GTA VI’ Soundtrack Contains 10,000 Songs By Randy Newman.” The kings of online comedy are as ready for the moment as anyone.
But what’s so funny about GTA 6 anyways? In an interview with Polygon about The Onion’s first-ever video game, The Onion Voting Simulator 3D, head writer Mike Gillis explained why he finds GTA 6 — and the “seismic impact” it’s bound to have come November — especially ripe for comedy.
“The world of quadruple or quintuple-A games is so funny,” Gillis said. “I think just like any time something becomes a center of gravity like that, to deflate it and play with people’s expectations and kind of feel like you’re kind of a dummy for thinking this is gonna change everything, that’s great! … It’s a game! I can’t think of any cultural product ever that’s changed everything forever. It’ll make a big impact and then it will evaporate!”
While The Onion looks forward to raining on everyone’s parade, Gillis said that he’s still very much excited for GTA 6 from an enthusiast side. That balance is part of what fuels The Onion’s wider approach to satirizing the world of video games, which the site has done for decades. (In 2019, it even launched its own parody of IGN, fittingly called OGN.) For Gillis, writing satire about video games is about resisting the “very passé way of engaging with games as if it’s an embarrassing hobby” and embracing how expansive the umbrella is.
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“Some of it’s just a toy, some of it is propaganda, some of it is produced by massive corporations that are trying to wring money out of you in addictive ways,” Gillis said. “It’s a really wide expanse. But then, it’s just like one of the most unvarnished joys. There’s this intrinsic love of just playing games. It’s so, so great. And so to come at it also from the perspective of an enthusiast, somebody who loves the medium, I think that also comes across when that’s how you’re talking about it instead of ‘I’m skeptical of it! Why would anybody ever play a game? Who are these fools in the beautiful artistic landscape of possibility!?’”
Considering that GTA 6 is poised to be an enormous game, The Onion should have plenty to poke fun at soon enough. Though it will also have a difficult task ahead of it, considering that GTA itself is known for lampooning every aspect of the modern world, including the video game industry. Can The Onion successfully outsatirize satire? We’ll find out come Nov. 19 — well, when we’re not too busy playing GTA 6, that is.
