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.) Even as these aspects have clashed at times with Rockster’s own growing interest in both gaming realism—hence the gas pump battles—and “heightened” narratives, their existence as pure escapism really can’t be discounted. While hundreds of imitators have cropped up in their wake, GTA games remain big enough to get lost in, and that allure isn’t getting any weaker as the years pass.
And so we collectively sit here, still nearly three months out from the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, and try to reckon with why it’s mad cow’d its way into so many people’s brains. Even as an agnostic, I can feel its weight on the landscape: The kind of thing that forces other developers to shift release dates and flee its shadow as all the figurative oxygen gets sucked out of the room. Its bigness, if not its importance, is inescapable: It’s a game that feels like it’s poised to serve as a capstone to a whole generation of video games where the solution to growing lists of technical and existential problems has been to pour in more money, more time, more hours of human work to make something bigger and shinier and “better” than anything that’s come before. That cycle is now producing bouts of online madness from something as basic as leaked videos of gameplay that genuinely don’t look meaningfully different from what players were doing in Grand Theft Auto V 13 years ago; it’s a cycle that’s imbued a silly video game about taking a guy’s car and then running him over with it 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, shiny, and fascinating. And, of course, they make such interesting things happen when the inevitable happens, and they finally, blessedly pop.
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