GTA VI Arrives in November: How Rockstar Turned Crime Into a $1bn Cathedral

Grand Theft Auto VI, reportedly costing more than $1bn to make, arrives this November as what may be the biggest video game release of all time. Its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold more than 230m copies since 2013. Rival publishers have shuffled their release dates to get out of the way, and the ripple effect has spread across the wider media — a media whose biggest rival, GTA VI seems to have noticed, is now TikTok and Instagram.

The game's first in-depth reveal came not at a trade show but in a Netflix special, complete with the cachet of making Netflix's own servers shudder on launch day. Not bad for a series that began, in 1997, as a top-down game about stealing cars and colliding with pedestrians.

How did a car-crime caper become a cultural colossus?

The first Grand Theft Auto was built by the Scottish developer DMA Design. There was no budget for a fact-finding trip to America; the whole studio had one PC with internet access. "We'd come in on a Monday and say: 'What movies did you watch at the weekend? What music are you listening to?'" designer Paul Farley told the Guardian in 2015. The DNA was already there: freedom, a heightened sense of place, sharp stabs of dark humour. The stolen cars had names such as Impaler and Mundano, echoing the Culprits, Autocrats and Fiascos parked outside hotels in Martin Amis's novel Money. As one online commentator put it, Amis deals in "great ugliness described with surprising beauty". That sounds like GTA.

Grand Theft Auto III changed everything in 2001. It was the series' first 3D world: the skyscrapers of Liberty City, based on New York, rose overhead, and pedestrians reacted with horror as you scattered them. It borrowed liberally from Goodfellas and promised players their own Scorsese movie. "It's real simple," says Christopher Byrd, a literary critic who covers games for the New York Times. "I'd never seen an urban landscape rendered like that in a game."

The cinematic borrowings kept coming:

• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City took Florida and leaned on Scarface and Miami Vice.
• San Andreas offered a sun-lasered southern California, drawing on hip-hop and Boyz n the Hood.
• Grand Theft Auto IV returned to an ersatz New York with an immigrant protagonist and a weathered eye on the American dream — as much a response to the "war on terror" as to Michael Mann.
• GTA V ticked off references from The Sopranos to Cyra McFadden's The Serial.

By GTA V, though, the references felt like a small part of the proposition. Los Santos had convincing traffic flows, a working fire department and a stock market. These things are all hustles, the game seemed to suggest, so why discriminate?

Is GTA really about crime?

Rockstar insists the violence is incidental to the world-building. "We do not sit down for design meetings and say, 'Let's make the most appallingly violent game possible,'" Leslie Benzies, then head of Rockstar's Edinburgh studio, told Digital Trends in 2012. "People know that games are no longer all about eating dots or blowing up spaceships. They can be dark and edgy and challenging."

Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar's Guide to the City, agrees the criminal pull is permanent. "We're never not going to have crime," he says. "The minute you have a rule, someone's going to want to break the rule." To Manaugh, crimes like bank robbery are "almost like an IQ test" — and real games. "You're solving the puzzle differently. On that level, there's no mystery to me why games and crimes go together."

GTA V even riffed on real heists, including the Hole in the Ground Gang, who drilled into a Los Angeles bank vault in 1986 and escaped underground, never caught. But violence alone can't explain the appeal. Games have been violent since the first Space Invader fell.

What actually stays with players?

Byrd points to the downtime. "Often it's the 'downtime' between missions: that's what stays with you the most," he says. "It's 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."

The density is deliberate. Writer and producer Lazlow Jones told Game Informer in 2009 about a reviewer who surfed the game's spoof internet: "I'm trying to find the bottom of this thing, and I can't." Fly over the mountains in GTA V and the controller delivers turbulence in little bursts of haptic feedback (physical vibration through the handset). You may not notice it. You'll notice its absence elsewhere.

Where does GTA belong in art?

Byrd reaches for Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk (a total work combining all art forms). "[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 cites an online post arguing games like GTA are the cathedrals of the 21st century — teams of the most talented people building something glorious for everyone, believers or not.

The novels comparison holds too: the journalistic 19th-century canvases of Zola and Thackeray, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser's favourite Middlemarch, Dickens opening Bleak House with one unimprovable word — "London." GTA, designed in Edinburgh, gives us the modern American landscape from fast food to talk radio.

What's in GTA VI?

A satire, a toybox, a knockabout Bonnie and Clyde update and a sincere love story about its two heroes, Lucia and Jason, trying to make a life in an unkind world — with restaurants named Effluvia. It's also a study in contradictions: a satire of consumerism that has made billions; an underdog story from a giant now fighting its dismissed former staff in court.

"A lot of us are jaded by AI slop and the fact that life feels artificial," Byrd says. "This is the one piece of a truly grand simulated reality that many of us are really hankering for." That paradox, unexplained and perhaps unexplainable, may be the series' defining achievement.