Grand Theft Auto V — Snap Judgement #8
A good game. A great game. A classic game. But not the game I expected — and hoped — it would be.
How I Played: I was shocked to see that Grand Theft Auto V had been added to Xbox Game Pass in January since it’s still a popular game that sells well, but, like all good things, it won’t last: on May 7th it leaves the service. (Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 will take its place, which seems like more than a fair trade.) I completed the game on Playstation 3 when it came out in 2013, dabbled with it again on PS4 in late 2017, and downloaded it to Xbox One this week, playing for about three hours and getting just over 8% of the way to full completion.
Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most successful games of all time. Name any metric that indicates success and GTA V will be at the top of that list. Sales? According to Wikipedia, GTA V is the second best selling game of all time, after Minecraft. Plus, it’s made the top-selling games of the year list basically every year since its release. Streaming popularity? The game is still one of the most streamed games on Twitch, to this day. Metacritic score? The three different platform versions are all on the top ten “all-time” list.
But, despite all of its success, personally, I’ve always viewed Grand Theft Auto V as a dissapointment.
Now let me be clear about what I’m saying here: Is GTA V a good game? Yes. Is it a great game? Yes. Is it a classic game? Yes. But is it the game I thought it was going to be? No. Based on my experiences with the other Rockstar games I had played, I expected GTA V to be a momentous evolution. I thought the franchise had turned a corner. But, if anything, Grand Theft Auto V was a return to form.
The thing that started forming my expectations for Grand Theft Auto V was Grand Theft Auto IV, my first experience with the franchise. I had heard about the first five Grand Theft Autos (I, II, III, Vice City, and San Andreas), but, without playing them, I only grasped two major ideas about them: First, they were obviously filled with adult content. In addition to the guns and explosives that could be unleashed on city streets filled with innocent civilians, these games were also filled with drugs and prostitutes and all manner of sin. But the other thing I understood about these games is that they were also kind of silly. Yes, there was all this vice, but, from what I’d heard, Rockstar centered their games on those things to thumb their noses at authority. These games seemed like a troll of sorts, something designed to generate pearl-clutching and outrage.
When I played Grand Theft Auto IV, all of the vice was present — guns, drugs, prostitutes, etc. — but the game was not as silly as I had anticipated. Sure, Niko Bellic’s descent into Liberty City’s underworld had a tongue-in-cheek vibe with the story’s ridiculous characters and the city’s satirical advertisements, but the whole thing was strangely, beautifully, bleak. In addition to the oppressive dark grey and brown color palette, Niko often discussed how his experiences with war had hardened him to the world, and that now he was watching a similar version of that nightmare play out in a place that claimed to be peaceful and free.
GTA IV felt cynical but wise. Playing it reminded me of talking to the older kids on the school bus that would profess opinions that were primarily designed to shock us younger kids, but were also grounded in truth. (The one I remember best was “MPAA movie ratings only exist to warn parents how uncomfortable they’ll be if they take their kids to a certain movie.”) The best example of this dynamic was buried in a menu that described a multiplayer mode: “Deathmatch. It’s kill or be killed, capitalism style.” Eighteen year old me had never heard capitalism described in such a stark way, and the description sticks with me to this day.
Two years later, my expectations for GTA V were recalibrated again when Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption. Although GTA IV and RDR were mechanically similar, Red Dead Redemption infused GTA IV’s blunt satire with a much needed dose of nuance. Liberty City spoke through flashy advertisements and NPCs shouting into their cell phones. Red Dead’s rural wilderness offered fewer opportunities for those types of moments, so almost everything had to be filtered through more subtle and personal techniques, like carefully calibrated conversations and NPC interactions.
Some of these moments put the finest actors and films to shame. I’ll always remember the doomed attraction that Bonnie had for John — and perhaps vice versa — that was only ever communicated in glances and between lines of dialogue. Sometimes all the game used to direct your emotions was a perfectly placed song to accompany the thunder of your horse’s hooves. This nuance made the game feel personal in a way that GTA IV never quite managed (except, perhaps, at the very end of its story).
On November 2nd, 2011, with these two experiences floating around in my mind, I watched the newly released trailer for GTA V, perhaps the greatest videogame trailer ever made. Even though it clocked in at just under 90 seconds, the trailer was loaded with beautiful little visual vignettes. A woman pauses while crossing the street to glance at a convertible retracting its roof. A man hammers a “for sale” sign into his yard. A group of workers tending a field is sprayed with pesticide, leaving them doubled over and coughing. A man with a cardboard sign panhandles beside a highway. An oil pump churns beside a vivid sunset.
While many wondered if tiny visual details might confirm hard facts like who the protagonist would be, I was obsessed with how, in a broader sense, the trailer seemed to promise a blend of GTA IV’s loud cynicism and Red Dead Redemption’s subtle nuance. It was clear that the flashy advertising and loud NPCs would return from GTA IV, but the visual stories being told suggested perhaps this game was also going to get RDR’s elegant conversations and subtle interactions.
But, two years later, after I finally got my hands on Grand Theft Auto V just a week or two after it’s September 17th, 2013 release date, I realized that, In the end, it got neither.
Like its predecessor, GTA V had all the basics you’d expect: the guns, the drugs, and the crime were all still there. The loud advertisements and the louder NPCs were back too. But the game’s attitude had shifted. GTA IV’s wise cynicism seemed to have curdled into outright anger in GTA V. The protagonists aren’t weary, they’re mad. They’re not wise, they’re simply experienced. Playing GTA V didn’t remind me of talking to the cool kids on the bus, it felt like listening to a guy ranting on the side of the road. The game had changed from “War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.” to “Oh, I’m living the dream baby! And that dream is fucked! It is…fucking fucked!”
GTA V took the subtlety that Red Dead Redemption forged and threw it out the window. Characters’ conversations, most of which are riddled with unnecessary expletives, focus purely on the obvious. Michael rants about his frustrating son. Franklin rants about how stupid his friend Lamar is. Trevor rants about everything. The game’s plots about planning and executing heists is enjoyable, but it’s only motivated by the characters desire to get out of dodge and save their own hides.
That’s not to say it’s all bad, though. The best part of GTA V is simply driving around the spectacular city Rockstar created. In addition to being an eerily accurate recreation of the real LA, Los Santos is filled with life and character. If you slow down and stop at a few red lights, you’ll find a remarkable world that makes you feel like an insignificant tourist. It’s a shame that such a magnificent work is only the backdrop that most people speed past while trying to get to the next mission.
As I sat with GTA V, I realized that my disappointment around the story and characters was deeper and broader than just this one game. In the early 2010s, it felt like videogames were on the precipice of real, mainstream cultural significance. It felt like we were waiting on one game that would prove to the wider world that videogames had the evocative potential of more popular mediums like films and music. The release of this game would be a singular moment that forced naysayers to smack their heads and say, “of course! How could I not have seen it before!” The aggravating shorthand parlance for this event became “the Citizen Kane of videogames.”
It really seemed like GTA V was going to be that game. GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption had gotten close, but they didn’t have that explosive cultural impact I expected. They had laid the groundwork, and now GTA V was going to close the deal. All the pieces were in place. The path was clear. The hype — billboards and TV ads were everywhere — was there. This was it. This was going to be the game.
But Rockstar had different plans. My theory is that, instead of aiming to make a game that was more serious than GTAIV and RDR, GTA V was an attempt to return to the silliness of the earlier Grand Theft Auto games. They wanted to go back to San Andreas literally and spiritually.
The problem is that they were too late. Part of what made those earlier games silly were their technical limitations. The wanton violence was likely easier to laugh at when it was low-poly and pixelated. The novelty of the game’s open worlds overshadowed the characters and the story, and perhaps Rockstar mistook audiences’ love of the world as love for the characters and story.
It felt, to me, like the world had moved on from the silly crassness of the earlier GTAs. It felt like the release of GTA V was going to be the coronation for a new era of games — games that would have all the snark and wit and technological prowess of the GTA series, but that would also have deeper insights and more cultural impact.
Instead, we got the best iteration of the era I thought we had evolved past. What we got instead was a good game. A great game. A classic game.
But it wasn’t the game I expected.
(That game had come out just a couple months earlier.)
