After 13 long years of anticipation, Grand Theft Auto VI will finally debut next week – and bring gaming into the cultural mainstream along with it.
In the quarter-century since Grand Theft Auto first went 3D with the 2001 release of Grand Theft Auto III, the series has become one of the most recognizable franchises in video game history – and arguably the most prevalent Mature-rated franchise of all-time.
Taking open-world inspiration from its family-friendly ’90s stage-setters in Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GTA III brought the sandbox of exploration into a life of crime, putting players in control of a violent, silent protagonist who completes jobs for different criminal syndicates around Liberty City, largely based on New York City.
Since then, the series has seen four other major installments for consoles – Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 and Grand Theft Auto V in 2013 – but none have carried anywhere near the anticipation that GTA VI is bringing into its release next week.
In addition to it being a whole 13 years, it’s impossible to ignore just how massive of a game Grand Theft Auto V became, sparking the start of Grand Theft Auto Online while netting releases for two subsequent generations of video game consoles after initially debuting for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Throughout its 13-year lifespan and across all platforms, Grand Theft Auto V has sold a whopping 235 million copies worldwide making it the second-best selling video game of all-time, only trailing Tetris or Minecraft, depending on the source of the list.
A combination of the game’s ubiquity with a younger generation who have played the title for most of their lives and older gamers who first became familiar with the franchise in the early 2000’s has created one monster of a moment for video games as the release of Grand Theft Auto VI nears.
Sure, there have been plenty of other big moments in video games since the release of GTA V. The debut of the Nintendo Switch 2 last year was a huge momentum boost for a company that continues to find their own lane in the industry. Individual titles such as Elden Ring and Starfield attracted widespread attention around their releases and received mostly glowing reviews from critics.
But none of that really even comes close to what we’re about to see with GTA VI, a game with anticipation that has brewed both from the franchise’s legacy with its previous games as well as the sheer amount of time that the game has taken to make.
It’s no secret to anyone that video games simply take much longer to make today, something that any Bethesda Game Studios fan will be eager to tell you – with still no timeline for a release of The Elder Scrolls VI a whole 15 years after the initial release of Skyrim in 2011. Development of the game dates all the way back to 2014, with principal production beginning in 2020 – rumors surrounding the game have swirled around the industry for much of this decade.
GTA VI will mark the series’ return to the Miami-inspired Vice City, with much of the game’s development in recent years centering around replicating the culture of 2020’s Miami – so we can expect plenty of references to the get-rich-quick crypto bros, OnlyFans models and the omnipresent Florida Man that help define the city’s culture and reputation today.
Satire has of course always been a primary component of GTA games, an element that often provides a degree of political commentary in games that are supposed to be about fulfilling the life of crime you would never imagine carrying out in your real day-to-day life.
A big part of what has always brought Grand Theft Auto to the forefront of the general public’s knowledge has been the series’ longtime propensity for controversy – something we should fully expect after next week’s release, with the only question being what the controversies will be.
Over the years, several real-life crime sprees from troubled teens have been attributed to Grand Theft Auto games, while the content of the games themselves have always stirred up a good deal of public dismay.
The depiction of Haitians and other ethnic groups in Vice City earned plenty of criticism from Haitian American leaders, while a minigame discovered through modding in San Andreas that involved a sex scene led to the brief re-rating of the game to AO for “Adults Only” before the code was removed from the game.
Controversies didn’t escape the series as it moved into a new generation of consoles, with the ability to drive drunk in GTA IV receiving pointed criticism from MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) who lobbied the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) to change the game’s rating to AO for the inclusion of the element. In the most recent installment of the series, a mission that involves a graphic torture scene was poorly received by rights groups and game critics alike, who viewed it as tasteless commentary on the use of torture by the U.S. government.
This steady stream of controversies surrounding the series over the years have only led to its general public perception of being an incredibly violent set of video games that brings out the absolute worst in people.
Yet with even a little media literacy (something this country and the world at-large desperately need more of), one can see a lot of the genius and beauty behind the GTA games, depicting a slice of unstable, turbulent life that is just as American as baseball and apple pie. It’s an indictment of how we as a country fail large swaths of our population, depriving scores of people of the education, shelter, stability and other resources needed to lead a steady, successful life.
For the average American who has never had to deal with waking up to gunshots in the middle of the night or seeing a carjacking with their own eyes, Grand Theft Auto games are putting violent ideas into the minds of young people, normalizing the kind of behavior that should never be part of a functioning society.
But the whole point of these games, in a way, is to point out how much our society is not functioning – and just how little has changed from the same brand of satire used in 2001 for GTA III.
For the millions of people who have spent a part of their lives around unprovoked, senseless violence, GTA can come across as a sobering picture of how life can be very cheap when someone doesn’t have anything to lose, even if the games themselves are of course heavily exaggerated and meant to have a degree of humor to them.
All of these elements that have thrusted the game into the public spotlight are going to resurface later this month when GTA VI finally drops, alongside the slew of controversies that are almost guaranteed to follow. For much of it, it probably can just be traced back to a lack of media literacy and the drive to shut our eyes and ears when things we don’t want to see or hear are happening around us – but these games push the envelope on these touchy issues for good reason.
These things are part of real life for many people who are not born into opportunity and did not choose to be surrounded by people who have been failed and no longer have anything to lose.
For the vast majority of people playing GTA games, it just isn’t that deep. It’s a fun, open-ended series full of exploration and interactions with a wide range of characters while having the ability to just carry out a regular urban lifestyle – whether that is in the form of driving a taxi or ambulance or taking the subway to get from place-to-place. Beneath all the controversy and noise, GTA is in many ways a much more eventful life simulation where you have a wide range of freedom to make the game whatever you want it to be.
These are very broad appealing factors that draw so many people, my wife and I included, into these games. They’re immersive and fun while also giving an incredibly deep world of places and characters to explore with a slew of cultural references to decipher – something the series greatly leaned into with the 1980’s Miami setting of Vice City and the early 1990’s California setting of San Andreas.
For millions of people, the release of GTA VI signals a new frontier in the world of gaming – as we sit on the precipice of what is likely to be the most realistic looking and feeling video game many of us will have ever played. The years of anticipation don’t even quite match up to the disbelief of watching the game’s extended trailers, leaving myself in absolute awe of just how far the industry has come since I’ve been alive.
In the eyes of corporate mass media and much of the general public, GTA VI will be seen as yet another signifier of further cultural decay and debauchery, and it will likely be erroneously labeled as a celebration of all of the worst parts of American life.
Maybe it wouldn’t look like a celebration if we could all see just how accurate the depiction really is.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be released for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on Nov. 19, 2026
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