Grand Theft Auto is a crime for which those convicted in the USA can spend up to three years behind bars. Above all, it is the title of the most famous series in video game history. On the occasion of the long-awaited trailer for the sixth part of GTA: a declaration of love.
If you want to get an idea of how hungry fans can long for a greeting from the kitchen, take a look at the YouTube comments column under the GTA VI trailer released on Monday evening. Many a delighted gamer works with more capital letters than Donald Trump after a court date. “WE HAVE WAITED 10 YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT AND NOW IT’S FINALLY HERE,” one of them writes from the soul to all the others.
The hype is real. 60 million views in twelve hours – for the trailer alone on the channel of the developer studio Rockstar Games. There’s actually not that much to see in the one and a half minutes apart from snazzy graphics and incoherent scenes from the Miami rip-off Vice City. It doesn’t matter, as long as there’s something.
Read what the trailer reveals here:
By the time the GTA VI lettering and the good news “Coming 2025” appear at the end, every fan will get goosebumps. All this for a video game? Yes. And completely rightly so.
GTA – a reliable milestone
“Good things take time.” Hardly anyone indulges in this motto, which sounds so painful to greedy gamers, as much as the GTA developers. However, even though Rockstar Games has exploited the “current” part of the series beyond recognition over the past ten years and milked separation-shy hardcore fans to the last drop, they never really opposed the studio. Because they know: the wait is worth it.
With titles like GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 (basically the western version) they were presented with simply masterpieces. So far, Rockstar Games has reliably set a new benchmark for the entire industry with every title – and has done so for years. That’s roughly as if FC Bayern only played in the Bundesliga every decade. All the other clubs would know that if they decide to just play football, we can only bow. GTA plays in a different league, even a different sport.
When GTA V was released in 2013 during the Playstation3 era, Rockstar earned a billion dollars – in the first three days. Today, ten years and two console generations later, the game has sold 190 million copies. I myself bought the game twice – for two different Playstations.
Wonderfully senseless violence
I’ve been playing GTA since I was eight years old. At the turn of the millennium, the brightly colored, pixelated top-down view and the fact that the game character was prone to flatulence via key commands distracted my mother, who was concerned about my salvation, from the fact that the game was basically a rampage simulator.
This senseless and excessive violence was then as now a trademark of the series and is just as much a part of it as the fact that at some point, after a few dozen hours of play, every player, in a fit of anti-rebellion, changes the rules of the road in a (stolen) car discovered and obediently stops at every traffic light. This excursion into the virtuous usually lasts a red phase – then the shooting starts again.
It’s true: There’s probably no other game where you can murder so uninhibitedly. But anyone who believes that GTA glorifies violence is probably also debating alcopops. GTAx is basically a digital romp room. The only difference is that the energy-excessive gaming children are not jumping on sweaty blue gym mats with their glasses taped shut in the thick air, but instead are lying on the sofa in the curve-swallowing position, wrapping their handles around the sticky controller and, full of quiet delight, dragging passers-by out of their sports cars, bouncing prostitutes – etc just shoot around randomly.
Our world – just ten shovels over it
But GTA is much more than that. It is probably one of the best written satires in entertainment history. The GTA universe is a grotesque reflection of our reality, real madness. To help you understand, just an example from the current part of the series:
In one mission, Michael, one of the three protagonists, is tasked with planting an explosive charge in the prototype of a new generation of smartphones on behalf of his slimy, aluminum-hatted hacker buddy Lester. So we steer our late forty-year-old character to the nearest hipster boutique, dress him in ridiculous IT clothes (including cargo shorts and a colorful vest) and go to the headquarters of Lifeinvader – an absurd, dystopian mixture of Apple, Facebook, and Google . Here we chat to an employee who becomes our Vergil in this millennial hell: In the headquarters lined with beanbags, hacky-sack-playing, morally depraved geeks work to make the world a little worse every day.
After the work is done, our character leans back on the couch at home and lights a cigarillo that we can almost smell. Together we watch on live TV as Lifeinvader CEO Jay Norris presents his new invention to a cheering crowd. She can’t contain herself because of her enthusiasm, while Norris does it boasts that the average Lifeinvader employee is 14.4 years old. At some point we’ll call out this twisted, evil amalgamation of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. When he answers the phone in front of the camera, the smartphone – and his skull. Our friend Lester is happy – after all, he bought shares from the competition.
It’s stories like these that make the series the masterpiece it is. GTA is our world, just one to ten steps over it. Everyone gets their fat off here: from the yoga-addicted lifestyle Buddhist to the meth-addicted, psychopathic white-trash image. The spectacular optics, the martial shooting around, even the eponymous car stealing are basically secondary. GTA is a gloss of ones and zeros.
For my part, I’m already feeling wanderlust when I think about my trip to Vice City the year after next. And till then? GTA V is probably also available for the Playstation5.
