Over the past week, the biggest story in all of gaming was a series of videos showing…not much, really. The problem (which has now launched God knows how many reaction videos on YouTube, a bizarre apology post from the game’s developers, and a slew of quickly implemented lawsuits) was not the content of the videos (fairly harmless revelations of such radical video game mechanics as “driving a car” or “dancing in a club” or “being near a beach”), but from which game they had been stolen: November’s Grand Theft Auto VI. The videos, released online by an instantly famous hacker, arrived a week before GTA VI received its big Netflix reveal announcement on August 27, which would end up showing a slightly brighter version of the same basic crime movie tropes that the series has been exploring for almost 30 years. The strange thing about the leaks, then, was not what they showed about Grand Theft Auto, but the brains that received it. Because damn, but games in general are weird in Grand Theft Auto these days. For context: It’s been 13 years since Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V, which became, within the first 24 hours of its release, the fastest-selling entertainment product in human history. (It is currently the third best-selling video game of all time, surpassed only by Tetris and Minecraft.) Something had clearly clicked into consumers’ brains: GTA V sold almost 10 times what Grand Theft Auto IV had achieved in 2008, surpassing that success to become a true cultural giant. Arriving just as the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era was coming to a close, GTA V represented a certain high point for Rockstar’s vision of the open-world game it had pioneered and codified with Grand Theft Auto III, and then simply continued to serve as said high point, as players obsessively logged on to the game’s online branch, while Rockstar began work on, first, Red Dead Redemption 2 and then, inevitably, GTA VI. Sure, GTA V had official re-releases for PlayStation 4/Xbox One and PlayStation 5/Xbox Is it any wonder, then, that GTA VI has taken on totemic status: the One True Game returns to dispense salvation to a ruined hobby? It’s part of what makes these leaks so toxic to the brain of an interaction engine that now spins freely in response to your exposure. Long overdue and hoping for an entire industry to ride on its back, GTA VI has become a game for all people, to the point where internecine wars have been fought over whether it should have working gas pumps, while real wars might need a brief hiatus so recruiters can use time with the game as a bribe to replenish soldiers. As someone who loved GTA III, thinks GTA V is okay, and whose main connection to the franchise these days comes from watching the cars in GTA IV go too fast, all of this may seem inexplicable. “Actually?” I think from time to time. “Are you going to put this wrapped around the video game shaft with Trevor on it?” But I suspect the answer comes down to a potent combination of demographics and quality. The quality aspect is objective, although it is fraught with unpleasant nuances: Rockstar games arrive with as much plaudits for their scope and technical polish as for stories about crunch culture or accusations of union busting levied on the company. It’s really easy to pick up Grand Theft Auto V as your first “serious” video game and understand its mechanics, its structure, and the simplistic themes of its crime story. Many games demand something from players, whether it’s mechanical or mental rigor, but that’s never been Rockstar’s concern. To enjoy Grand Theft Auto, you don’t need to waste time on complicated menus or obscure gameplay concepts or basically anything you haven’t seen before in a dozen other video games, just brighter. You start the game, you start running over people; It’s really as simple as that. The demographic issue, meanwhile, stokes a host of boils under the skin of modern games. The world of Grand Theft Auto has always been a mix of college-boy favorite cop movies and a certain relentless cynicism that’s hard not to code, in my opinion, at least, as aggressively young and aggressively masculine. (It’s not for nothing that the revelation that GTA VI’s Bonnie and Clyde-style story would mean you’d spend some of your time playing as the Bonnie in question, Lucia, produced a frothing reaction from the online hordes.) The “jokes” that Grand Theft Auto is filled with, including the fake commercials highlighted in that recent Netflix promo, are the jokes people might tell their college (or, if I’m less charitable, high school) friends: Corrupt sex politicians diabolical, supposedly “shocking” transgressive humor, commercial parodies that wouldn’t pass as a table read on SNL, and the kind of rarefied wit capable of creating a fast-food chicken restaurant whose name sounds like “Fucking Hell.” More than its frequently facile attempts at comedy and political satire, however, the world of Grand Theft Auto serves the demographic that flocks to it because that world, itself, is comfortably transgressive: it’s a reality in which you can drive, drive through fences, get into a shootout with the police, and then successfully escape. (And if you don’t, don’t worry; it just means a quick comeback and a few dollars from your typically overflowing wallet.) Even if these aspects have sometimes clashed with Rockster’s growing interest in both gaming realism (hence the gas pump battles) and “heightened” narratives, their existence as pure escapism can’t really be discounted. While hundreds of imitators have emerged in its wake, GTA games are still big enough to get lost in, and that appeal doesn’t weaken as the years go by. And so we sit here collectively, still almost three months away from the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, and try to understand why it’s a mad cow that made its way into so many people’s brains. Even as an agnostic, I can feel its weight in the landscape: the kind of thing that forces other developers to change release dates and flee from its shadow while all the figurative oxygen is sucked out of the room. Its greatness, if not its importance, is inescapable: it’s a game that feels poised to serve as the cornerstone of an entire generation of video games where the solution to growing lists of technical and existential problems has been to invest more money, more time, more hours of human labor into making something bigger, brighter, and “better” than anything that’s ever existed before. That cycle is now producing fits of online madness from something as basic as leaked videos of gameplay that don’t really look significantly different from what players were doing in Grand Theft Auto V 13 years ago; It’s a cycle that has imbued a silly video game about taking a guy’s car and then running him over with the fate of an entire multi-billion dollar industry. And, hey, maybe that’s a clue as to why we’re all so weird about Grand Theft Auto these days: bubbles are pretty, after all. Big, bright and fascinating. And of course, they make such interesting things happen when the inevitable happens and they finally, thankfully, explode.
