RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 4 sourcesOver the past week, the biggest story in all of gaming was a series of videos that showed… not much, actually. The issue (which has now launched god knows how many YouTube reaction videos, an odd apology post from the game’s developers , and a whole host of quickly deployed lawsuits ) wasn’t the content of the videos—pretty innocuous reveals of such radical video game mechanics as “driving a car” or “dancing at a club” or “being near a beach”—but what game they’d been stolen from: This November’s Grand Theft Auto VI . Dropped online by an instantly notorious hacker, the videos landed a week before GTA VI was set to get its big Netflix reveal announcement on August 27 , which would wind up showcasing a slightly shinier take on the same basic crime movie tropes the series has been mining for nearly 30 years. The weird thing about the leaks, then, wasn’t what they showed about Grand Theft Auto , but about the brains receiving it. Because, hot damn, but is gaming as a whole weird about Grand Theft Auto these days.
For context: It’s now been 13 years since Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V , which became, in the first 24 hours of its release, the fastest-selling entertainment product in human history. (It’s currently the third-best-selling video game of all time, beaten only by Tetris and Minecraft .) Something, clearly, had tipped over in consumers’ brains: GTA V sold nearly 10 times what Grand Theft Auto IV had managed back in 2008, leapfrogging off that success to become a genuine cultural juggernaut. Arriving just as the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era was coming to a close, GTA V represented a certain high point for Rockstar’s take on the open-world gameplay it had pioneered and codified with Grand Theft Auto III —and then just sort of went on serving as said high point, as players obsessively dialed into the game’s Online offshoot, while Rockstar started work on, first, Red Dead Redemption 2 , and then, inevitably, on GTA VI . Sure, GTA V got official rereleases for the PlayStation 4/Xbox One and the PlayStation 5/Xbox X/S, but the fact that one of the planet’s biggest gaming franchises skipped nearly two entire console generations without apparently losing its grip on players’ imagination remains one of the great oddities in modern gaming.
Is it any wonder, then, that GTA VI has taken on totemic status—the One True Game coming back to dispense salvation on a blighted hobby? It’s part of what makes these leaks such toxic brain candy for an engagement engine now spinning freely in response to their exposure. Long-delayed, and with the hope of an entire industry riding on its back, GTA VI has come to be all games to all people, to the point that internecine wars have been waged about whether it should have working gas pumps , while actual wars might need to be put on a brief pause so recruiters can use time with the game as a bribe for re-upping soldiers. As someone who loved GTA III , thinks GTA V is fine, and whose primary connection to the franchise these days comes from watching the cars in GTA IV go too dang fast , the whole thing can feel inexplicable. “Really?” I think from time to time. “You’re getting this wrapped around the axle on the video game with Trevor in it?”
But the answer, I suspect, comes down to a potent blend of demographics and quality. The quality aspect is objective, if laden with unpleasant undertones: Rockstar’s games arrive with just as many plaudits for their scope and technical polish as they do stories about crunch culture , or allegations of union busting levied at the company. It’s genuinely easy to pick up Grand Theft Auto V as your very first “serious” video game and understand its mechanics, its structure, and its simplistic crime story themes. Many games demand something from players, whether it’s mechanical or mental rigor, but that’s never been Rockstar’s worry. To enjoy Grand Theft Auto , you don’t need to futz around with complicated menus or obscure gameplay concepts or basically anything you haven’t seen in a dozen other video games before, only shinier. You start the game, you start running people over; it’s really as simple as that.
The demographics issue, meanwhile, pokes at a whole host of festering boils that run all under the skin of modern gaming. The world of Grand Theft Auto has always been a blend of college kids’ favorite crime movies and a certain relentless cynicism that is hard not to code, to my own mind if nowhere else, as both aggressively young and aggressively masculine. (It’s not for nothing that the reveal that GTA VI ‘s Bonnie And Clyde-esque story would mean you spent part of your time playing as the Bonnie in question, Lucia, produced a frothing reaction in the online hordes.) The “jokes” that Grand Theft Auto fills itself with—including the fake commercials highlighted in that recent Netflix promo— are the jokes people might toss around with their college (or, if I’m being less charitable, high school) buddies: Corrupt sex fiend politicians, allegedly “shocking” transgressive humor, commercial parodies that wouldn’t make it through table read at SNL , and the kind of rarefied wit capable of creating a fast food chicken restaurant whose name kind of sounds like “Fucking Hell.”
More than its frequently facile stabs at comedy and political satire, though, the world of Grand Theft Auto serves the demographics that flock to it because that world, itself, is comfortably transgressive: It’s a reality where you can drive around, slam through fences, get into a shoot-out with the cops, and then successfully escape. (And if you don’t, no worries; it just means a quick respawn and a few bucks out of your typically overflowing wallet...
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