The undeniable influence of Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto is a household name. Whether you’re a fan of video games or not, you will likely understand the gist of this behemoth series. It feels ingrained into the history of pop culture at this point, but if you polled a dozen random people, they would probably offer a wide range of answers as to why.

The series has courted controversy from the very start with DMA Design’s Grand Theft Auto in 1997, which was notable for its groundbreaking open-world design and its violent content.

“We started to get complaints,” said Brian Baglow, formerly of DMA Design and Rockstar Games, in Episode 1 of Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game. “You know, and questions in the house, and I think the first person to sort of call for the ‘banning of this sick filth’ was Lord Campbell of Croy, and then all the other politicians jumped on the bandwagon, and it became all about the controversy.”

It’s a shadow that has proved long, looming over every game since. But while it remains under intense scrutiny, one thing that can’t be denied about Grand Theft Auto is its popularity and influence on the games industry. Rockstar North’s most recent entry, 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, is one of the most successful and profitable entertainment products of all time, raking in over $6 billion in revenue as of 2018.

Its shared-world multiplayer component, GTA Online, boomed during the pandemic and is still growing as of 2022, nearly a decade after its release. Rockstar recently revealed that the next entry in the series is in active development, breaking the internet in the process.

To fully comprehend Grand Theft Auto's impact, we must go back to perhaps its most disruptive outing. 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III shifted perspective from a bird’s eye view to a third-person camera, putting players in the shoes of Claude, a vengeful criminal free to roam the fully-3D world of Liberty City, a pastiche of New York City that, for the time, was a technical marvel due to its detail and sheer scale.

Reactive pedestrians walk the world as if it were their own, one that is propped up by a 24-hour clock and a physics engine ahead of the curve. The freedom the developers provided to explore and cause chaos while telling a scripted, cohesive story was a remarkable feat for the time.

Players could form memories in Liberty City that became break room gossip, like where to find the best car, the Banshee, and the inputs necessary to unlock every weapon or lower your Wanted level, cheat codes still latent in the muscle memory of some players. This online forum-filling affinity for tips, secrets, easter eggs and in-game myths built a community around the series, which persists to this day. Most players have a story about seeing Bigfoot in the forests of San Andreas…

Later games in the series would expand on the freedom of GTA III. In 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which featured an even more immense landmass based on California and Nevada, protagonist CJ Johnson boasts stats reminiscent of RPGs. Players could work out (or eat junk food) to change their body type. They could also buy tattoos, haircuts and outfits to curate a virtual avatar and flesh out CJ’s portfolio with real estate assets, customisable cars and side jobs, adopting more and more real-life practices into Rockstar’s expanding virtual playground.

You can see the DNA of Rockstar’s design choices in series like True Crime, Saints Row, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed and Mafia, as well as individual games like Sleeping Dogs and The Simpsons: Hit & Run. All of these games pushed these influential ideas in exciting directions, the developers adding their own personal flair and making valuable contributions to the video game canon.

This is where GTA’s use of real-world pop culture also started to sing. Radio stations, complete with presenters, satiric advertisements and underground and popular licensed music, have been a touchstone of the series since its inception. Fans fell in love with the high-concept reality-adjacent transmissions that flourished as GTA made the shift to 3D. In later games like San Andreas, radio stations would become essential for fleshing out in-game characters and building a world that felt persistent and realistic to players.

Many will be familiar with Lazlow Jones, who worked with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser to write the radio stations and plays a fictionalised version of himself in the games.

“For me, it was about trying to make the GTA stations authentic to what I knew about radio and also to point out what was ridiculous about radio,” said Jones, in Episode 2 of Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game. “You know, for example, if you work in radio, the people calling the station are not your fans, the people that call in are insane or lonely.

“We made fun of left-wing loonies, right-wing crazies, rednecks, intellectual jerks… popstars…” Jones continued. “The shows in GTA are a satire on America, but they also tie into the vibe of the game.”

Nowadays, legendary artists and tastemakers like Skepta, Julian Casablancas, ROSALÍA and Frank Ocean all host their own stations within GTA Online, curating a wide range of genres and exposing a treasure trove of new music to the masses. Rockstar’s record label CircoLoco Records, founded in 2021, feels like a natural culmination of the series’ dedication to music culture. The series is such a cultural phenomenon that it inevitably influences itself.

GTA’s unique cinematic aspirations have only grown over the years too. From Twin Peaks’ Kyle MacLachlan in GTA 3 to Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta as protagonist Tommy Vercetti in Vice City and Samuel L. Jackson’s Officer Tenpenny in San Andreas, celebrity voice actors brought blockbuster names, credibility and weight to the series’ narratives.

But that doesn’t mean Rockstar wanted to translate Grand Theft Auto to the silver screen, at least back in the early 2000s, when the offer was reportedly on the table. “I remember taking a call at about 4 AM from a producer in Los Angeles with an offer to make a film, and he said, ‘We've got Eminem to star, right, and it's a Tony Scott film, 5 million on the nose, are you interested?’,”said Kirk Ewing, an agent and games industry veteran close to the developers in Episode 2 of Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game.

“And I phoned up Sam, and I said look. Listen to this. They want Eminem in the Grand Theft Auto movie and Tony Scott to direct, and he said ‘not interested,” Ewing continued. “And at that point, they withdrew from any conversation about making a film when they realised that the media franchise that they had - what they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time,” he continued.

With a consistently broad cast of memorable (sometimes still viral) side characters and a taste for lampooning pop culture, Rockstar’s games have thrived thanks to the unique creative possibilities of the video game medium and grown to feel like big-budget drama series with ensemble casts in their own right. And while in Grand Theft Auto V, the game’s narrative still firmly has its tongue in its cheek, you need only look to Rockstar’s most recent game, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, with its filmic slow-burning tragedy of a story, to see the maturing influence of these early ideas of blending the silver screen with the CRT.

Not that GTA invented this idea of putting actors into games — see David Bowie’s appearance in 1999’s Omikron: The Nomad Soul — but as of late, games like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and next month’s The Callisto Protocol all feature talent from the silver screen in meaningful roles.

Fast-forwarding to 2022, it’s clear that Grand Theft Auto’s most significant recent development has been GTA Online. In this peerless multiplayer experience, you can join up and live a second life with your friends (as well as random players around the world) in the startling sandbox that is Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos and Blaine County. From its humble beginnings in San Andreas’ co-op feature, Grand Theft Auto’s online multiplayer component has only grown in importance through its expansion in Grand Theft Auto IV and now Grand Theft Auto V, where it feels like a living, breathing world.

“The last time I checked the city of Los Santos had a population — an online playing population — of about 33.8 million. That's insane! That's, you know, bigger than a lot of cities around the world,” said former DMA and Rockstar publicist Brian Baglow, in Episode 6 of Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game. “And it's an entirely virtual location that the people are choosing to spend their time in. And people are doing that for a reason, and it's not because ‘I can steal cars and shoot policemen.’

GTA Online has become a second home to many players, who check in daily to maintain friendships and build communities, as well as their virtual bank balance. Since its release in 2013, GTA Online has inspired countless open-world games and still hasn’t entirely run out of ideas either, introducing submarines, private islands, a car meet, and even Dr Dre as of late.

This staggering multiplayer project has its own currency, virtual businesses and creative communities, and arguably the most engaging gameplay in the series history with Heists. These complex, multi-layer missions demand communication and grit from dedicated teams of players but pay dividends if done correctly.

GTA Online’s Shark Cards, virtual credit cards on which players can spend real money to earn the in-game currency GTA$, were a controversial introduction. GTA$ allows players to purchase all manner of cosmetic and gameplay assets like cars, weapons, properties and businesses. The option of buying Shark Cards is tantalising if you want to experience everything GTA Online offers.

While you can technically grind to earn everything naturally, Shark Cards are an attractive gateway to GTA Online’s latest and greatest content. Many attempts have been made to replicate the scale and scope of Rockstar’s inimitable online world, but it still remains a games industry golden goose.

As of recent years, Rockstar’s focus has shifted to the multiplayer components of its games, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why. The continued revenue is likely funding their future ambitions, and given their track record, the industry waits with bated breath to see what they’ve come up with this time.