Rockstar Games’ ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series is known for its blend of gratuitous violence with dark satire and toilet humor. While other developers have been known to remove offensive content from their games under pressure from the woke (Blizzard Entertainment removing an in-game slur against orcs, for instance), Rockstar has usually stuck to its guns, defending graphic depictions of torture and murder, pushing back against legal efforts to hold the company responsible for real-life murders, and only self-censoring one line of text from ‘Vice City’ in which the player is urged to “Kill all the Haitians.”
However, Rockstar has preemptively removed a depiction of the Confederate flag from an upcoming remastered version of ‘Vice City.’ Ahead of the game’s release next month, an eagle-eyed fan on Reddit noticed that one of its characters, a bank robber and weapons expert named Phil Cassidy, no longer sported the Confederate flag on his t-shirt. The shirt’s other designs remain in place, but the infamous ‘Blood Stained Banner’ has apparently been replaced with a skull.