Crime pays: how Grand Theft Auto became a cultural colossus

Ever since it crashed on to PC and consoles in the late 90s, GTA has been tearing up the game-making rulebook. We explore how its cultural references, rebel spirit and sprawling sense of freedom make it a definitive work of art

In the 00s, when the Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games revealed a new project, video game writers from all over the UK would make the journey to the company’s office in London. They would be ushered one by one into a darkened room to sit facing an enormous TV. There would be a dish of sweets on a low bench in front of them but, in the reverential hush that descended, it was never entirely clear if it was acceptable to eat them.

After a few moments, the screen would come to life. Rockstar would sometimes begin its presentation not with footage from its new game, but clips from classic movies. This is the context of what we are making, Rockstar was saying, and that is where we belong.

Yet, what’s interesting is that the studio’s ambitions were already straining against its cinematic influences. A cowboy adventure such as Red Dead Redemption might start with curated moments from spaghetti westerns – but the game itself would be eager to evoke everything from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Warlock (the 1958 revisionist Old West novel by Oakley Hall) and the paintings of Frederic Remington.

Rockstar has since grown in stature so much that its newest game, Grand Theft Auto VI, had its first in-depth reveal in a Netflix special, with the added cachet of making Netflix’s own servers shudder a little on launch day.

So many video games deserve a place in the wider culture of the age from which they came. What are the 1980s without Pac-Man and Tetris? But with the release of Grand Theft Auto VI this November, Rockstar finds itself in unprecedented territory. The numbers alone are dizzying. Grand Theft Auto V, which launched in 2013, has sold more than 230m copies, and GTA VI is said to have cost more than $1bn to make.

This is surely the biggest video game release of all time – one that has sent rival games rushing to find other street dates, and sent ripples through the rest of the media (and beyond). That raises a few questions. How did Rockstar get to this point with a game that initially explored the simple pleasures of running people over? What are the cultural touchstones ensuring GTA continues to fascinate so many people, regardless of whether they’ve ever picked up a game controller? And when it comes to art, where does GTA belong?

The first Grand Theft Auto was made by the Scottish developer DMA Design in 1997. Players would race around a series of fake US cities, stealing cars and colliding with pedestrians. The action was viewed from a top-down perspective and the tone was high-spirited, befitting a design heavily inspired by the penny victories of pinball.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2015, Paul Farley, one of the game’s designers, explained that there was no budget for a fact-finding trip to the US, and there was only one PC with internet access in the whole studio. “We’d come in on a Monday and say: ‘What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?’” Nonetheless, what can now be seen as the GTA experience was already starting to form. Here was a game offering freedom, a heightened sense of place, and sharp stabs of dark humour. The cars that players could steal had names such as Impaler and Mundano, reminiscent of the Culprits, Autocrats and Fiascos parked outside hotels in Martin Amis’ novel Money. Amis was already a useful reference in broader ways, too. As one online commentator said, Amis deals in “great ugliness described with surprising beauty”. That certainly sounds like GTA.

Grand Theft Auto 2 offered a polite expansion on these central ideas, but by the time of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, the series was evolving. GTA III was the first game in the series to offer players a 3D world to explore, which meant the skyscrapers of Liberty City, based on New York, now rose overhead, while the pedestrians wandering its streets looked recognisably human, and reacted with horror as you sent them scattering.

The game was a gigantic hit, in part because of its references to films such as Goodfellas, and its promise of placing players within their own Scorsese movie. But the real thrill came from being in a world that had been so richly observed. GTA III was overwhelming.

“It’s real simple,” says Christopher Byrd, a literary critic who writes for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and covers games for the New York Times. “I’d never seen an urban landscape rendered like that in a game.”

GTA III’s approach, setting crime stories in a detailed open world in which the player could go wherever they wanted, came to define the series’ 3D games – as did the cinematic influences. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City took the action to Florida and was heavily inspired by Scarface and Miami Vice, while Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, set in a faded, sun-lasered version of southern California, borrowed from hip-hop culture and movies such as Boyz n the Hood.

This ensured that when Grand Theft Auto IV took the action back to an ersatz New York, an increasingly thoughtful tone was not the surprise it once would have been. We weren’t playing pinball any more. The game now focused on the immigrant experience of an eastern European protagonist, approaching Liberty City with a weathered eye on the American dream. It was still a game that understood the subversive thrill of stealing cars and running people over, but it was as much a response to the “war on terror” as it was to the films of Michael Mann and his contemporaries.

By GTA V, the series had become something larger and stranger. GTA V has plenty of cinematic and even literary influences, ticking off everything from The Sopranos to the likes of The Serial, that glorious skewering of so-Cal obliviousness by Cyra McFadden. But by this point, these references to other media felt like a small part of the overall proposition. The simulation elements, which had been growing since players of the first GTA got into a car and changed the radio station, were now taking over.

The city of Los Santos had convincing traffic flows and a working fire department that would respond to any accidents you might cause on your road towards riches. Outside pulling off heists, players could make a fortune on the stock market or real estate. These things are all hustles, the game seemed to suggest, so why discriminate?

The sheer breadth of the games Rockstar was making by this point was intoxicating. Talking to Game Informer in 2009, writer and producer Lazlow Jones revealed that “one of the best quotes we saw was from a reviewer who stopped at the internet cafe and surfed the spoof internet we created. They said something like, ‘I’m trying to find the bottom of this thing, and I can’t.’”

But if you’re trying to understand the appeal of a series like GTA, the criminal element is still important. As Leslie Benzies, then head of Rockstar’s Edinburgh studio, told Digital Trends in 2012: “We do not sit down for design meetings and say, ‘Let’s make the most appallingly violent game possible.’” Instead, he explained, the team is drawn to worlds in which violence is everyday life. “People know that games are no longer all about eating dots or blowing up spaceships,” he said. “They can be dark and edgy and challenging.”

This approach will never go out of style. “We’re never not going to have crime,” says Geoff Manaugh, the creator of the “architectural conjecture” website BLDGBLOG, and the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, a wildly good read that explores the relationship between urbanism and crime. “The minute you have a rule, someone’s going to want to break the rule.”

Put like that, perhaps games like GTA are perfect for exploring criminality. “I’m only using this as an analogy, but crimes [like bank robbery] are almost like an IQ test,” Manaugh says. “In the sense that you’re presenting people with things in front of them, and then you’re asking them to connect them in a way that results in this goal.” To Manaugh, these crimes are often real games. “You are playing by the rules in a different way, and you’re solving the puzzle differently. On that level, there’s no mystery to me why games and crimes go together.”

GTA V riffed on various real-world crimes, including the work of the Hole in the Ground Gang, who drilled into a Los Angeles bank vault in 1986 before escaping underground and have never been caught. But the lurid appeal of the outlaw life still can’t entirely explain the appeal of GTA. After all, games have been violent since people shot their first Space Invader.

“The [non-gaming] public imagines that these games are nonstop kinetic affairs in which you’re always doing something, robbing someone, getting in a fight,” Byrd says. “And people who spend a great deal of time with them know that often it’s the ‘downtime’ between missions: that’s what stays with you the most. It’s the aimless driving or seeing the mountaintop and going up there and watching the sun cycle for 45 minutes. There’s a possibility of dwelling in the world that I think is unique … the Grand Theft Auto games are so stuffed with incidental details and little pieces of gameplay that you can create for yourselves. You’re just enjoying the purposeless beauty of it all.”

This is territory that GTA has marked out for itself. “The closest phenomenological experience that we’ve had before as human beings … is that moment when you leave the movie theatre and the illusion is still in your head,” Byrd says. “You just saw Tom Cruise in a film, and when you’re walking out of that movie theatre, you’re walking … as though you have your own Tom Cruise swag going on. That’s now in video games, but it’s really only this one series that’s done this.”

Manaugh is not surprised that recent GTA games seem to be all but overwhelmed by their detailed simulations of the cities in which they are set. “There are just so many overlapping things to pay attention to if you go into a city,” he says. “They are just constantly laminating different types of opportunities [on] top one another … They’re lands of fecundity and promise.”

In other words, GTA may be making the case that the city is now an artistic form in its own right. For Byrd, this makes the most recent GTA games something broader than a video game that is influenced by cinema and pop culture. It puts him in mind of the gesamtkunstwerk beloved by Wagner: a work that combines a range of disparate art forms into a cohesive whole. “[GTA’s] more of a totalising artwork that is bringing everything together,” he says. “The music is as much of a pillar as the driving, the shooting, the conversations.” He goes on to cite an online post he read arguing that games like GTA are the cathedrals of the 21st century. “You have teams of the most talented people coming together to create this glorious work that we can all be appreciative of, in which people can find something of interest to them, whether or not they’re in the church of video games.”

Games such as GTA V belong in the context of those journalistic 19th-century novels by the likes of Zola and Thackeray that used the widest lens possible to capture a time and place. They’re the equivalent of Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser’s own favourite novel, Middlemarch. They’re the equivalent of Dickens opening Bleak House with that unimprovable one-word sentence: “London.”

Such a glittering constellation of influences helps explain why GTA VI seems to have something in it for almost everyone. It’s a satire, a toybox, a knockabout updating of Bonnie and Clyde and a surprisingly sincere love story about its two heroes, Lucia and Jason, who are trying to make a life for themselves in an unkind world. Alongside the usual run of cinematic references, GTA VI seems fixated on social media, perhaps a canny understanding that Hollywood’s biggest rivals are now TikTok and Instagram.

In the run up to its release, it is easy to focus on the game’s lavish variety, but to say that you can simply do a lot of things in GTA these days – sky-diving, off-road racing, manning your own taxi cab, annoying alligators – is increasingly missing the point. The point instead lies with the density of every frame: the fuzzy edges of exposed drywall in an apartment that has been hastily refitted as a drug den, the brisk splatter of blood that appears on paintwork when someone’s face collides with it. And it goes beyond these vivid details into the realms of things you may only vaguely be aware of. Fly over the mountains in GTA V and the game delivers turbulence in little bursts of haptic feedback through the controller. You may not even notice it, but afterwards you might notice its absence in other games. They don’t pull you into their worlds as convincingly.

But perhaps the defining characteristic of GTA is not its wealth of details, but the contradictions that these details inevitably allow to percolate – contradictions as deeply rooted as those of the country it explores. GTA is a satire of consumerism that has itself made billions of dollars. It’s an underdog story from a gigantic company that is now fighting its dismissed former staff in court. It’s about criminals who scare us, except for the odd ingenious bank robber who we might feel is sticking it to the man. And GTA VI aims to deliver a textured depiction of a modern relationship in a world where the restaurants have names like Effluvia. It’s a representation of the modern American landscape, from fast food to talk radio, that was masterminded by a studio based in Edinburgh.

Maybe these internal contradictions, and that clarifying distance, are what are truly vital about this game. “A lot of us are jaded by the pressure that digital life has exerted upon us,” Byrd says. “We’re jaded by AI slop and the fact that life feels artificial. There is some kind of great paradox that we shouldn’t try to necessarily explain away: this is the one piece of a truly grand simulated reality that many of us are really hankering for.”