GTA
Image: Rockstar

News broke recently as part of a larger Bloomberg article about Rockstar's changing culture that Grand Theft Auto VI was to feature the series's first female protagonist. As expected, this got the internet up in arms, with some commenters yelling that Rockstar was going "woke" (whatever that means), while others were mad at why it had taken so long for Grand Theft Auto to introduce a playable female protagonist.

Normally we'd just ignore this, pick up a controller, and walk away to avoid being caught in the crossfire online, but in this case, it was too frustrating to see people once again discount the work of GTA's original creator DMA Design and spread more misinformation about the making of the games.

You see, before Rockstar Games ended up taking over the Grand Theft Auto series and plastering its name all over the box, its original developer DMA actually included multiple female protagonists in the PC version of the game - something that many fans and even some video game publications seemed to have forgotten entirely.

These included a black character named Divine, a Hispanic character called Katie, a Scandinavian woman named Ulrika, and a Japanese character named Mikki. Together they represented half of the available options for Grand Theft Auto's first playable protagonist.

We certainly don't intend for this article to shut down any legitimate concerns about how this new protagonist will be portrayed come GTA VI's release day, but we do think it's important to correct this misconception about the series.

When Grand Theft Auto was first released, it was actually a lot more progressive than people give it credit for today, making it clear that anyone could get stuck into the open-world crime game regardless of their ethnicity or gender.

Now it seems that Rockstar is finally beginning to catch up, after years of dragging its feet and making excuses.