A player knows that there is always something in the center waiting to catch them, that the AAA-game “ 30-second loop” of driving and shooting in new circumstances will return eventually. In both its online multiplayer and story-focused modes, this willingness to go to any random idea is always secured by the game’s willingness to return to that safe, solid core.
What is striking about playing GTA 5 in 2022 is how unfocused it is, how willing the game is to just take a player down a weird route of heists, train car abductions, cargo plane takedowns, and an entire torture minigame (more on that shortly). The solution that GTA 5 came up with to resolve this, and which I think has something to do with its decadelong staying power as both a single and multiplayer game, was to create an extremely robust driving and shooting game skeleton and dress it with whatever interesting ideas came to mind. How do you keep flipping the bird at the monoculture when you are the marker against which every other open-world action game is measured? They each spoke to both their time and place in specific ways, parodying the mass culture of those eras while also becoming the dominant mass culture of the early 2000s. GTA 4 tracked an immigrant’s story into a deeply commodified culture of grifters and schemers. Vice City played up the early 2000s nostalgia for the coke-fueled party scene of the 1980s and its visual and musical industries. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has always functioned as commentary, speaking directly to elements in mass culture, liberally borrowing the plots from different crime genre films and eras, trading on heroic melodrama and peppering these worlds with goofy violence. I’ve spent the last couple months slowly playing through the game on my Xbox Series X to figure out exactly where this artifact from 2013 lands nearly a decade later.Īfter all, it is an artifact. That number is only going to keep creeping up now that Grand Theft Auto 5 has launched on the newest gaming consoles (and now that new details about GTA 6 have reportedly emerged). The game is brain-splittingly big in its impact and its reach. If copies of GTA 5 were people, the total copies sold would be commensurate with the population of Bangladesh. A little short of 40 million people live in California. Not of the size of its world, or the weapons, vehicles, and people in it, but with sales data: Since its initial release in 2013, across all platforms, GTA 5 has sold something in the realm of 165 million copies worldwide. Any discussion of Grand Theft Auto 5 has to begin with scale.
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