Rockstar Games have removed the Confederate flag out of GTAV and replaced them with the American Flag. And they did it at an appropriate time since Twitch introduced guidelines at the end of 2020, which banned the display of the Confederate flag due to its symbolic association with slavery and white supremacist groups.
The developer and publisher of the GTA franchise has since replaced all Confederate flags with American flags across all games where such flags aren’t crucial to the narrative. Gamers first caught wind of this after the flag was removed from one of the trailer parks in Grand Theft Auto Online, beginning in 2015, though the symbol remained elsewhere in the game. With that said, this isn’t the first time Rockstar Games has removed the Confederate flag from its games. It’s still unclear whether this omittance of the symbol of Southern slavery has been removed from the remasters as a whole, though it seems unlikely that Rockstar Games went through all the trouble of such an alteration for the purpose of a single trailer. Among its reveals, the footage offers a brief glimpse of arms dealer Phil Cassidy – a recurring Grand Theft Auto character – sporting a black t-shirt with a skull across the front instead of his usual Confederate flag. As reported by Kotaku, the newly released trailer showcases many of the game’s graphical updates.
