Dr. Dre Wasn’t Originally Interested In Making GTA 5 DLC, Rapper Says

Iconic rapper and producer Dr. Dre stars in GTA V’s The Contract expansion, but he wasn’t originally on board with the idea of appearing in Rockstar’s open-world action game.

DJ Pooh, a rapper, producer, and voice of the West Coast Classics radio station in GTA V, told BET, “Initially, it was just no.” He added: “But that’s the normal answers you get from Dre.”

“The answer was initially no because Dre’s not a gamer. He just didn’t play any of the games. It’s not like he dislikes them or something, he just didn’t play them,” DJ Pooh said. “He was like, ‘I don’t make things for kids.'”

DJ Pooh spoke to Dr. Dre about the appeal of the GTA series and brought a copy of GTA V to Dr. Dre’s house in Calabasas to help convince him. It worked. Dr. Dre would later connect with executives from Rockstar, and it all came together.

“He was blown away. He didn’t know you could do all this stuff–all the layers of gameplay that people are calling the metaverse, but it’s doper than that,” DJ Pooh said. “He was like, ‘This shi** is awesome,’ and he’s seeing me driving around in a lowrider. We out here putting different rims on the car, getting in a shootout, hanging out with my friends, I got a girlfriend–all that!”

The Contract launched in December 2021. Rockstar Games co-founder Sam Houser specifically praised DJ Pooh for helping get Dr. Dre involved to help make the expansion such a big success.

“Thanks to our long-time collaborator and friend DJ Pooh, we were able to work with some of the biggest legends in hip-hop on this very modern Los Santos adventure as players track down Dr. Dre’s lost music,” Houser said.

The Contract is a story-based expansion for GTA Online that sees the return of Franklin from the main campaign. He creates a “celebrity solutions agency” and does whatever it takes to recover Dr. Dre’s missing music.

In other GTA news, Rockstar has confirmed that development on GTA 6–or whatever the next game is called–is “well underway.”