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.
The GTA Campaign, Re-Tuned
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.
As clear as that ambition is to see in the final product, Mike York had nothing close to a sense of that full picture when he first joined the GTA 5 development team as an animator, two and a half years before its launch.
“A lot of times during production you’re thrown in there, and you don’t know what the story is and how it plays out,” he says. “There are a lot of scenes where I didn’t even know what came before or after. I was so out of the loop with the story of the game. They just threw me a cutscene with Tanisha and Franklin and were like, ‘Hey, can you do the body animation on this?’ But I had no idea how it connected. All I knew is, ‘Damn, this girl looks mad at Franklin. She looks like she just broke up with him.’”
Even in the final six months of development, when members of the team were “all hands on deck” and testing the game for eight hours every day, it was impossible to perceive GTA 5 in its entirety.
“As a tester, you’re trying to play through the whole game over and over and over again,” York says. “But the game is very long. A lot of times I would play the game from the very beginning, up until 60% or 70%, and then a new build of the game would come out where they fixed a bunch of bugs. And so I only played the game from start to finish all the way one time, and that was after I was done from the project and played it at my house by myself.”
Only then could York finally appreciate the enormous puzzle he’d been contributing pieces to for so long. “I think the biggest thing I was shocked about was how massive it was, how big the world was, and how cool the system was of being able to switch characters,” he says. “I thought that was unique, and I knew that players hadn’t seen that before.” It’s a system that Rockstar’s peers in the triple-A sphere are only now catching up to – infusing Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows with swappable protagonists whose stories are entwined.
As an American, York appreciated Rockstar North’s Scottish perspective – an outsider’s view of the quirks and comedy inherent in LA culture. “I think they have a pretty good eye, a good touch on our society,” he says. “And that’s because, even though the main studio is in Edinburgh, a lot of the people that work there are from the US, or all they do is watch US TV shows and play US games. They’re engulfed in our culture in general. So even though they live in the UK, they have a good pulse on everything that’s going around here.”
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