It's 2023 and we've finally got a female protagonist for GTA 6. It's a long overdue first for the series. Of course, many have cried out that there were four female character options in the original GTA, but let's admit that we've come a long way since Grand Theft Auto was simply about top-down joyriding. This is one of the biggest and most profitable video game series in the world, we shouldn't have had to wait until 2023 to play as a woman, but at least it looks like GTA 6 is doing it right.
GTA 6 is miles away from the first GTA game where the female characters were little more than palette swaps, so this is groundbreaking new territory for the series. 2013 saw GTA 5 launch with a trio of male playable characters, prompting numerous discussions as to why not one of them was a woman. At the time, in an interview with The Guardian, former Rockstar Games' co-founder and vice president of creativity Dan Houser (who actually left Rockstar in 2020) said the reason was that "the concept of being masculine was so key to [GTA 5's] story". I don't 100% believe that, but if we take that framing at face value it makes the presentation of GTA 6 even more interesting.
