Grand Theft Auto Online’s Waymo Parody Was Originally Aiming At Another Tech Company

Dataminers figured out an interesting detail about Grand Theft Auto Online’s newly added KnoWay cars.

KnoWay is a satire of self-driving car taxi service Waymo.

In Los Santos, KnoWay can also be rented out for their self-driving cars, but it seems that there is something suspicious going on within the company.

The whole thing is an interesting repudiation of the current tech industry. But as it turns out, Rockstar did not originally intend to satirize Waymo.

What KnoWay Out Was Originally For

Tex2 (FKA Tez2) shared this info on Twitter:

KnoWay Out (Career Progress Plague) was previously called Sahara Surveillance.

Sahara is a delivery & logistics company in Grand Theft Auto VI.

GTAWiki shared even more information, in response to Tex2:

Sahara is the upcoming #GTAVI analogue of the e-commerce giant Amazon, with its branding appearing on delivery boxes and arenas in official screenshots from May.

Sahara Is Coming To Grand Theft Auto 6

Sahara has already been officially revealed in Grand Theft Auto 6 previews. As explained on the GTA Wiki page, there’s a sealed Sahara Mirage box in the background of a picture featuring Bae-Luxe from Real Dimez.

Subsequently, the Vice City Narcos home stadium is owned by Sahara. Therefore, it’s called the Sahara Arena.

The pun should be obvious, but we did want to spell it out in case fans miss the joke. While the real-life Amazon river is one of the densest, moistest parts of the planet, the Sahara is one of the driest deserts in a distant part of the Earth.

What Were Rockstar’s Plans With Their Original Amazon Satire?

We can’t help wondering what Rockstar originally planned using Sahara for these KnoWay Out missions. Ostensibly, the idea that your character will be taking on the big evil tech company got to stay.

But we suspect there were broader changes made to these missions, that happened during production and wouldn’t be caught in datamining anymore.

In specific, these KnoWay vehicles probably replaced Sahara’s delivery drones. On a gameplay level, it could be interesting to have been chasing drones around instead of self-driving taxis.

We can’t speculate too much what kind of story was intended here, but there is definitely a lot of things different about WayMo and Amazon.

But maybe those plans were simply carried over to Grand Theft Auto 6. And it may not even be in that game’s version of Grand Theft Auto Online.

Lucia and Jason could be taking on Sahara’s drones in a mission that could also be related to Real Dimez and their producer Dre’quan Priest. So that’s another reason to look forward to Grand Theft Auto 6 when it comes out next year.