In both online multiplayer and story mode, this willingness to engage in any idea is always backed up by the game's willingness to return to that safe, solid core.

What's striking about playing GTA 5 in 2023 is how unfocused it is, how willing the game is to take the player on a strange route of heists, train hijackings, cargo plane heists, and a full torture mini-game (more on that in a moment). The solution GTA 5 found to this problem, which I think has something to do with its decade-long staying power as both a single-player and multiplayer game, was to create an extremely robust driving and shooting game skeleton and infuse it with every interesting idea you can think of. We find ourselves here, and it becomes clear that Grand Theft Auto 5 wrestles with this paradox: What does it mean to stick it to the man when you are the man? How can you flip the monoculture the bird when you're the standard by which every other open-world action game is measured? Both games spoke to both their time and place in specific ways, parodying the mass culture of those eras while becoming the dominant mass culture of the early 2000s. GTA 4 followed the story of an immigrant into a deeply commercialized culture of grifters and schemers. Vice City played on the nostalgia of the early 2000s for the coke-soaked party scene of the 1980s and its visual and musical industries. The Grand Theft Auto series has always been a commentary that drew directly on elements of mass culture, taking the plots of various crime films and eras, relying on heroic melodrama, and spicing up those worlds with silly violence. That number will only increase after Grand Theft Auto 5 is released on the latest consoles (and now that new details about GTA 6 have reportedly surfaced).Īfter all, it's an artifact.

The game is unimaginably large in its impact and reach. If copies of GTA 5 were people, the total number of copies sold would equal the population of Bangladesh. California is home to a little less than 40 million people. Not with the size of the world or the weapons, vehicles and people in it, but with the sales figures: Since its initial release in 2013, GTA 5 has sold about 165 million copies worldwide on all platforms. Any discussion of Grand Theft Auto 5 has to start with scale.

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