False Facts About GTA You Should Never Believe
The Grand Theft Auto series has been a lightning rod of controversies, lawsuits, hidden secrets, and just flat-out misconceptions about the series' intent. Fortunately, a few of those things are pretty easy to clear up. These are just a handful of the false facts surrounding the GTA games - and the truth hiding in plain sight.
It's pretty much video gaming's equivalent of "You'll shoot your eye out." If you see GTA being played on TV, or on the news, the only thing you'll see is high speed chases, cops getting shot, and innocent civilians being beaten up. Yes, these are things that are possible in Grand Theft Auto, but there's a difference between what's possible and what is being actively encouraged, at least without purpose.
At this point, we're a long way from the days when straight-up rampages were encouraged, and even the ones in GTA 5 are intentionally given to the most unhinged, "don't try this at home" character in the game. The rest of your time in Grand Theft Auto is typically no functionally different than your average Michael Mann film.
In the broad sense, the series encourages grand-scale crime and gang activity. It looks far less kindly on pure psychopaths. In fact, Trevor Philips in particular is Rockstar's definitive statement on that, but oh, we'll get to that. "You f---ing s---! C---! C---! C---!" Rockstar's parent company, Take Two, has reportedly been crowing about GTA 5 raking in more money in its short existence than any entertainment product ever, to say nothing of gaming, where it's remained in the NPD's Top Ten sales charts since 2013.
There are, however, caveats. The biggest one is that profitable as GTA 5 is, it actually isn't the best-selling video game of all time. Not that GTA 5 is chopped liver, having sold over 90 million copies, but that's nothing compared to the 495 million copies of various versions of Tetris that exist.
Also, while they don't have physical copies to crow about, GTA 5 is still dwarfed by the sheer number of players, accounts, and money that has been spent on World of Warcraft over the years by around $3 billion - though that could certainly change at this rate.
Further qualifiers, of course, come when you compare the game to other media. The actual reach and visibility of the game goes down considerably when you factor in that the game typically costs anywhere from $35-$60 at any given moment. Meanwhile, Avengers: Endgame - the reigning all-time box office champion worldwide - sold over $2.7 billion in tickets, and factored in the much lower cost of a movie ticket, you have a film that hundreds of millions of people paid to see.
Ask a gamer to name the biggest negative about GTA 4, and poor cousin Roman's name will come up like a Pavlovian response. It's understandable: his constant invites to hang out tend to happen while the narrative's on a roll, or when the player has better things to do.
"Niko, it's Roman. Let us go to a strip club together. Thing is, if Roman annoyed you? Good, the game's done its job. People tend to forget that GTA 4 was one big, rambling, angry love letter to the American Dream, the tale of how Slavic immigrant Niko Bellic was lured to the States with promises of honest work, unforgettable sights, and romance beyond imagination.
Roman pops that dream bubble early on in GTA's story, and serves to prevent that bubble from inflating ever again. "All I hear about is Mr. Big, Mr. Roman, living the American dream... the only thing big about your life is the cockroaches." As much as you can do in Liberty City, it's Roman's inability to conceive of anything else to do except eat fast food, play darts, go bowling, go to a strip club, or drink himself stupid that makes him a constant source of anger.
It's that disgust at what Roman's version of the American Dream looks like that drives Niko to constantly seek out something bigger and better for himself. One of the big questions over the last decade or so is when exactly GTA will catch up with the rest of the gaming world and give us a female protagonist, something virtually every other open-world action game has managed to pull off.
Ironically, despite starting out as the first and most blatant GTA clone, Saints Row got there by its first sequel - and it didn't stop there. Rockstar's only commented on it once, with Dan Houser stating that GTA 5 was specifically a story about masculinity.
He wasn't wrong in that game's case, and arguably, Vice City was so specific a riff on Miami Vice and Scarface that Tommy Vercetti was the only option. But for Rockstar's other games, that excuse doesn't fly so much. More importantly is the fact that it's been done before.
Nobody talks much about the old top-down days of GTA, but the first one on PC was notable in that you had a full fledged roster of protagonists, four of whom - you guessed it - were female. And the thing is, it didn't affect gameplay that much except to the player themselves.
All the violence and mayhem and story lost nothing for it, but gained everything from being in a unique set of shoes. GTA Online has been proving the same for five years running. The three protagonists of GTA 5's single-player campaign are all, to shorthand things immensely, the Ghosts of GTAs Past, Present, and Future.
Michael represents old-school criminal mischief, Franklin the exhilaration of rising through the ranks to be on top, and Trevor, well… Trevor is just pure chaos. The entirety of GTA 5's narrative is about the potential way forward for the series. Michael having pie-in-the-sky dreams about making movies isn't an accident - it's saying out loud what gamers have always accused Rockstar of working up to since Vice City.
It's what critics have praised Rockstar for since the cinematic grandeur of Red Dead Redemption, and it's the thing most at war with the players who just want to destroy everything in their sights. It's not an accident that the chaotic Trevor is the one who confronts Michael about his lofty aspirations, only to face accusations that his violent immaturity is keeping the other two characters down.
