Nick Oulette of Vancouver is one of the millions of video game players around the world anxiously awaiting the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.
“The hype is so real with this one,” he told CBC News. “I do think it’ll be the game of the decade.”
GTAVI, the latest in the long-running series of open-world crime simulators by Rockstar Games, is predicted to be the biggest release in video game history — and not just by hardcore gamers or streamers.
Earlier this month, Steven Adams of the Houston Rockets told media he expects the performance of elite athletes in all major sports leagues to “plummet” as they spend most of their time playing the game instead of training.
Here are some of the reasons why the anticipation for GTAVI has reached a fever pitch.
A mega-popular series
The raw numbers are staggering by any measure.
The series has sold more than 470 million units since 1997, with Grand Theft Auto V alone selling more than 230 million. It remains one of the most-played games on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, thanks to its GTA Online multiplayer mode, according to Circana games industry analyst Mat Piscatella.
According to leaked data released by hackers earlier this year, GTA Online makes Rockstar about $500 million US every year, or $1.3 million every day.
Lucia and Jason, the main characters of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI. (Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive)
Piscatella says 29 per cent of U.S. gamers with a PC or console intend to buy GTAVI at some point, whether at launch or later on down the road.
“If a game gets in the teens-percentage in purchase intent, it’s going to be a hit. If it’s in the high single digits, it’s still really good. But when you’re approaching nearly one-in-three, that’s kind of off the charts,” he told CBC News.
The long wait
GTAVI comes with more than a decade of pent-up anticipation.
Grand Theft Auto V first launched on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox One more than 13 years ago. Development for GTAVI reportedly began around eight years ago. Rockstar only released one major game in the meantime: Red Dead Redemption 2, in 2018.
Rockstar has said very little about the game itself, fuelling a cottage industry of speculation and fake videos purporting to be leaked footage online.
A view of Vice City, one of the playable areas in Grand Theft Auto VI. (Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive)
We know the game features two playable characters: Jason and Lucia, a couple juggling their romantic relationship and burgeoning criminal careers in Leonida, the GTA world’s satirical version of Florida. But little else about the story, or what players will be able to do, have been teased.
“There is still a lot we don’t know about GTAVI, and it’s kind of mysterious … including its budget,” said Toronto-based games writer and podcaster Nadia Oxford.
Open-world games with the ambition of GTA are rare, Oxford notes, because they are “horrendously expensive to make” at the production levels expected in today’s industry.
Rumours this fall suggested GTAVI’s budget surpassed the $1.5 billion US spent to build Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper; Rockstar refuted that claim in interviews with Bloomberg, but did not confirm a price tag.
A gamified life simulator
Oulette estimates he’s played GTAV for about 500 hours; much of that time was spent during the COVID-19 pandemic, spending time with his friends online while in lockdown.
“That was a really big contributor to my mental health,” he said, “because you could just hop in a car with your buddy and drive down the coast and be like, ‘Yeah, how are you doing right now? Are you OK?'”
Oulette says the games’ meticulously designed worlds are a cut above others in the same genre, thanks in part to its licensed music, and locations and storylines that satirize real-life pop culture and politics.
“It just kind of makes you feel a little more sane in this insane world when you’re playing [this] video game for some reason,” he said.
WATCH | GTAVI launch trailer:
Stephen Totilo, a New Jersey-based games reporter, says that while the GTA games quickly built reputations as a “mayhem simulator,” there are plenty of ways to play it without revelling in carnage.
“A lot of people take the GTA games as shock games…. It’s the crime, it’s the sex, it is the profanity,” he said.
“But I think that’s only part of what’s interesting about what Rockstar is doing, and that what stood out to me … was this effort to simulate, or even gamify, every aspect that they could think of in the game world.”
Early reports have speculated that GTAVI will go even further than past entries, requiring you to fill your car with gas, and eat healthy foods and work out regularly at the gym lest you gain weight that will make you less effective in combat.
Totilo says it will be interesting to see whether keeping up with the “gamified realism simulation” will still be fun for players.
A litany of controversies
The GTA games have a long history of controversies. Oxford points to the moral panic over players’ ability to kill civilians, including sex workers, and an infamous sex scene that was cut from 2004’s GTA: San Andreas. Players found unfinished files of the interactive sex scene and leaked it online with the nickname “Hot Coffee.” The U.S. Federal Trade Commission rebuked Rockstar for not disclosing its existence, even though it wasn’t used in the final retail release.
The very first GTA, a top-down game with 2D graphics, got a verbal drubbing in the U.K. House of Lords for its violence, notably the ability to run over pedestrians with a car.
GTAVI has had its own share of controversies even before the release. Hackers have leaked unfinished content from the game, supposedly revealing details like beaches crowded with civilians, Jason cloning a car’s FOB to steal it and the ability for players to walk around completely naked.
And some ex-Rockstar workers in the U.K. are taking the company to court because it allegedly fired several employees (including three in Canada) for attempting to unionize.
Jason and Lucia in Grand Theft Auto VI. (Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive)
It’s a love story
Beyond the mayhem, carjackings and explosions, Totilo says GTAVI might be the highest-profile love story ever told in a video game.
“There’s been plenty of romance in video games before, but nothing of this scale. Nobody has ever put possibly a billion dollars into making a game that appears to be set to be ultimately about a couple,” he said, adding that it’s also the first time a woman will be a playable main character in a GTA game outside its online modes.
“I think it’s a real special moment for the industry and for the culture of games.”
