GTA VI and the $1bn Question: Is Rockstar's Crime Saga Art?

Grand Theft Auto VI arrives this November with a reported production cost of more than $1bn, on the heels of a predecessor that has sold over 230m copies since 2013. By any measure, it is shaping up to be the biggest video game release of all time — one that has pushed rival studios to rearrange their own launch dates and sent ripples through the wider media industry. Its first in-depth reveal came in a Netflix special that strained Netflix's own servers on launch day.

How did a series built on running people over get here? The answer runs from a Scottish studio with one internet-connected PC to a game that critics now compare to Wagner and Dickens.

Where did GTA start?

DMA Design, a Scottish developer, released the first Grand Theft Auto in 1997. Players raced through fake US cities from a top-down view, stealing cars and colliding with pedestrians, in a tone designer Paul Farley compared to the cheap thrills of pinball. "We'd come in on a Monday and say: 'What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?'" Farley told the Guardian in 2015, explaining that there was no budget for a fact-finding trip to America.

The formula — freedom, a heightened sense of place, dark humour — was already forming. Even the stolen cars' names, like Impaler and Mundano, echoed the satirical naming in Martin Amis's novel Money.

What turned it into a phenomenon?

Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 delivered the breakthrough: a 3D open world (a playable space the player can roam freely) whose skyscrapers of Liberty City rose overhead, with pedestrians who reacted with horror. Literary critic Christopher Byrd, who covers games for the New York Times, puts it plainly: "I'd never seen an urban landscape rendered like that in a game."

The cinematic references stacked up — Goodfellas in GTA III, Scarface and Miami Vice in Vice City, Boyz n the Hood and hip-hop in San Andreas. By GTA IV, the series engaged the immigrant experience and the "war on terror"; by GTA V, the simulation itself had taken over. Los Santos had working traffic, a fire department and a stock market. Writer-producer Lazlow Jones told Game Informer in 2009 about a reviewer who tried to find the limits of the game's spoof internet: "I'm trying to find the bottom of this thing, and I can't."

What keeps the crime at the centre?

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.'" The team, he said, is drawn to worlds where violence is everyday life. Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar's Guide to the City, goes further: "We're never not going to have crime. The minute you have a rule, someone's going to want to break the rule." To Manaugh, a bank robbery is almost an IQ test — a puzzle solved by playing by the rules differently.

But violence alone doesn't explain the appeal. Byrd argues the lasting memory is the downtime: "the aimless driving or seeing the mountaintop and going up there and watching the sun cycle for 45 minutes... You're just enjoying the purposeless beauty of it all." He compares the experience to leaving a cinema still walking with Tom Cruise's swagger — something only this series, he says, has achieved in games.

So what does this change for art?

For Byrd, modern GTA is a gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's term for a total artwork combining all art forms): "The music is as much of a pillar as the driving, the shooting, the conversations." He cites an online post calling such games "the cathedrals of the 21st century," built by teams of the most talented people, with something for anyone — churchgoer or not.

The series' contradictions are part of the texture: a satire of consumerism that has made billions, an underdog story from a giant company now fighting dismissed former staff in court, an America imagined from Edinburgh. GTA VI, starring Lucia and Jason in a Bonnie-and-Clyde-inflected love story with a fixation on social media, may be the one grand simulated reality that audiences still crave — Byrd's words — in an age jaded by "AI slop."