There are over 230 million copies of Grand Theft Auto 5 in the world. As the second-highest selling game of all time, it has been played for billions of hours by players across the globe, making it one of the most significant pastimes in the entire world. That’s an impressive achievement for what in 2013 was simply the highly-anticipated next entry in Rockstar’s beloved (and notorious) open-world crime series. But GTA 5 proved to be much, much more than a typical sequel. It has become home to a huge, expressive, and loyal community, one which has made a digital hobby of everything from warring alien clans to producing slick vehicle stunt movies.
This is the story of how a video game became much more than a crime simulator.
Ash Skyqueen’s avatar weaves between the traffic of busy Dorset Drive on a motorbike spouting flames. Suddenly she veers, mounting the pavement at high speed and rebounding from the roof of a bus stop to achieve incredible air. Momentum carries her through a perfect circle, barely bigger than a human body, that forms the second ‘O’ of the ‘LIQUOR HOLE’ store sign. Pulling the ripcord of her parachute, she lands with a slight stagger at the door of the rundown booze establishment on Eclipse Boulevard - a couple of streets over from where her jump began.
It’s the first feat in a stunt montage which Ash put together to celebrate ten years of GTA 5 – the game that gave her freedom, companionship and goals when she was robbed of all three. “I’d had a ruptured disc in my spine, so I was bed bound shortly after the game came out,” she says. “All day every day for about three years straight, it became my therapy in a way. You’re stuck in bed, can’t do anything, can’t work, no social life, a pretty miserable existence. And then I’m suddenly connected to a community of people doing the same thing. It kept me from going insane.”
It’s a striking demonstration of why GTA 5 has remained a deeply important game to millions of players. A pillar of pop culture, it was erected in 2013 and has loomed over the entertainment industries during every year since. Thanks to the enduring love for its single-player story campaign and its ever-popular, seemingly invincible online mode, GTA 5 has spanned three console generations and made around $10 billion dollars for publisher Take-Two – over 3 times more than the highest-grossing movie ever. When Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds made Free Guy, a Hollywood comedy about the social connection and wanton violence of online games, it was GTA they chose to riff on.
Where previous Grand Theft Auto entries were cinema-riffing crime simulators that routinely broke sales records, GTA 5 has evolved beyond those confines. It has become an alternate world where players can escape to a funhouse mirror version of LA – the most mythologised city on the planet. There they become whoever they want to be: stunt specialist, bank robber, nightclub kid, hitchhiker or filmmaker.
In some ways, GTA 5 was a course correction for Rockstar. While 2008’s Grand Theft Auto 4 had been rapturously received, it was a narrower interpretation of what the series could be. Some players chafed against its dour and grounded tone, as well as the unforgiving driving simulation that threatened to hurl speeding players through the windscreen. It was a largely straight-faced vision that left a space for rivals like Saints Row developer Volition, who filled the vacuum with gleefully absurd city sandboxes populated by dildo-toting gangsters and gimp chariots.
GTA 5, however, saw Rockstar reclaim its lost territory in the single-player space without compromising its serious storytelling chops. The developer turned up all the dials on its screaming satire, filling its campaign missions with ludicrous plane, train, and helicopter setpieces in which the bodies hit the floor without moral consequence. The driving was made friendlier, and the oppressive skyscrapers of GTA 4 replaced by the open freeways of the San Andreas countryside. Yet GTA 5 also told the ambitious tale of three controllable protagonists at totally different points in their lives – Franklin, the young and hungry Scarface-in-waiting; Michael, the washed-up cuckold; and Trevor, the psychopathic embodiment of the five-star Wanted level.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/im-shocked-that-people-are-still-playing-how-gta-5-took-over-the-world
