As the shadow of GTA 6 looms, Just Cause lead isn't put off by comparisons to Rockstar's goliath as he prepares to release Samson: "There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else"
It’s hard to argue that 2026 isn’t GTA 6’s year as it looms on the horizon, threatening to overshadow any game that dares release anywhere near it, but the lead behind one rival urban action game that’s been unable to escape Grand Theft Auto comparisons from fans and publishers alike is still confident he can offer something new when it launches tomorrow.
Samson is being developed by Liquid Swords, a studio founded by Just Cause lead and Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg, and looking at its gritty city environment with open-world districts full of fast cars, fists, and the law on your tail, it’s hard not to see the similarities between it and GTA. However, speaking in an interview with PC Gamer, Sundberg suggests Samson might offer a nice palette cleanser for any Rockstar fans.
“There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else,” he says, before making a movie analogy. “And so I see Samson as being like back in the day when action movies were 90 minutes long, not over two hours. I keep on going back to watching Die Hard and Ronin and First Blood and Rambo. I think there’s a space for us there, and that’s where I want to end up.”
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Sundberg admits, however, that prospective publishers haven’t all seen it this way. Liquid Swords “tried to find a publisher for years, and we’ve always heard the GTA fear,” he says. However, he puts this down to them not giving Samson enough time to shine.
“When we looked at the metrics of how much they’ve played the game, they’ve only played Samson for 20 minutes. It’s 10 minutes past the tutorial, almost,” he continues. “And they’re not going into every detail that we have that is unique to our game. It’s just, ‘Oh, because it’s set in a city and it’s an urban environment with cars and violence, then it has to be GTA.'”
I can’t help but wonder if GTA 6’s November release might have had any influence on Samson releasing in April, given that PC Gamer notes that Sundberg isn’t promising a bug-free launch, even though “we’re making it the best it really can be.” After all, a number of folks from different studios and publishers have stated that they want to stay far away from Rockstar’s launch, with one calling it a “huge meteor” they want to steer clear of the “blast zone” of. And those folks aren’t all releasing games that are in any way comparable to GTA 6, so you could understand any hesitance from Liquid Swords. We’ll just have to see how it’s received when it launches tomorrow, April 8.
GTA 6 might not feature an entirely rebuilt Rage Engine after all, as one report says it’s more of an expansion on what Rockstar used in Red Dead Redemption 2.
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