Is Grand Theft Auto 6 Going To Have A Female Protagonist?
More than eight years ago, Grand Theft Auto 5 was released and has dominated the gaming charts, breaking sales record after sales record including the best-selling and highest revenue video game in 24-hours, fastest game to $1 billion in revenue, and the best selling action-adventure game of all time. Just in 2020, the then seven-year-old game sold 20 million units and has not lost much of its cultural relevance through various mod community efforts and its strong core gameplay.
Naturally, fans of the ageing game are looking forward to its next iteration but according to several insiders, the development is still years out, possibly either because GTA 5 is still going strong or because its development has been a nightmare and a half. Keep in mind, GTA 6 isn’t even officially announced yet, but given the incredible success the franchise has enjoyed, it’s all but confirmed that we are getting a new game at some point.
Not only do they have something that they are working on but credible leakers around the game have implied that the game could have a woman as one of its protagonists as one of two options to play through the vast story which, once again according to leaks, is set in Vice City once more.
The main source for that bit of speculation is Tom Henderson’s video of a drawing based on existing assets that were created during the development stage. While that might be an unorthodox way of sharing information about a yet-unreleased title, Henderson has had hits with it before and it might just be a creative way to protect the source of his information while still getting the goods out for us to receive.
In the 49-minute-long video, we can spot a woman holding what appears to be an AK-47 in front of a sports car while a man in a jetpack is hovering beside her in the air. In the background, we got the usual Vice City skyline as fighter jets are flying by in a dangerously close fashion. While that in itself isn’t a great tell as many artworks in GTA’s history have featured women, it adds to mounting evidence of the female protagonist theory, which Henderson himself had shared on his Twitter before.
With the game still being three to four years out, we likely couldn’t expect concrete information during 2021, but it stands to reason that we will at least have a clearer idea of the direction the game will be taking us in 2022 including an announcement of the title and its rough storyline that fans may be looking forward to. Given the track record of these reporters involved, it looks increasingly likely we will be able to have the choice for the first time in the franchise's history.