Finally stealing cars again - a declaration of love to GTA

Gaming masterpiece - Finally stealing cars again - a declaration of love to GTA

If you want to get an idea of just how much hungry fans can long for a greeting from the kitchen, take a look at the YouTube comment column under the trailer for GTA VI released on Monday evening. Many a delighted gamer is working with more capital letters than Donald Trump after a court hearing. "WE HAVE BEEN WAITING 10 YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT AND NOW IT'S FINALLY HERE," one of them writes from the soul of all the others.

The hype is real. 60 million views in twelve hours - just for the trailer on the channel of developer studio Rockstar Games. Yet there's actually not much to see in the one and a half minutes, apart from snazzy graphics and disjointed scenes from the Miami knock-off Vice City. No matter, the main thing is something.

You can read what the trailer reveals here:

At the latest, when the GTA VI lettering and the good news "Coming 2025" manifest themselves at the end, every fan shivers with goosebumps. All this for a video game? Yes. And quite rightly so.

GTA - a reliable milestone

"Good things take time". Hardly anyone indulges in this guiding principle, which sounds so agonizing to greedy gamers, as much as the GTA developers. However, although Rockstar Games has exploited the "current" part of the series beyond recognition over the past ten years and milked separation-shy hardcore fans to the last drop, they have never really gone against the studio. Because they know: It's worth the wait.

With titles such as GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 (the western version, so to speak), they were presented with masterpieces. Rockstar Games has reliably set a new benchmark for the entire industry with every title to date - and has done so for years. It's a bit like FC Bayern only playing in the Bundesliga every decade. All the other clubs would know that if they were ever content to kick a ball around, we could only bow down. GTA plays in a different league, indeed a different sport.

When GTA V was released in 2013 during the Playstation3 era, Rockstar earned a billion dollars - in the first three days. Today, ten years and two console generations later, the game has sold 190 million copies. I myself have bought the game twice - for two different Playstations.

Wonderfully senseless violence

I've been playing GTA since I was eight years old. At the turn of the millennium, the brightly colored, pixelated top-down view and the fact that the game character was prone to flatulence at the touch of a button distracted my mother, who was concerned about my salvation, from the fact that the game was basically a simulator run amok.

This senseless and excessive violence is a trademark of the series, then as now, and is just as much a part of it as the fact that at some point, after a few dozen hours of play, every player, in a fit of anti-rebellion in a (stolen) car, rediscovers the Highway Code for themselves and dutifully stops at every traffic light. This excursion into virtue usually lasts one red phase - then it's back to shooting.

It's true: Probably no other game allows you to murder so unrestrainedly. But anyone who believes that GTA glorifies violence is probably still debating about alcopops. GTAx is basically a digital romp room. The only difference is that instead of jumping on sweaty blue gym mats in the thick air with their glasses taped shut, the energetic game kids are lounging on the sofa in a curve-swallowing position, wrapping their pens around the sticky controller and, full of silent rapture, dragging passers-by out of their sports cars, bruising prostitutes - or shooting at random.

Our world - just ten notches above

But GTA is so much more. It is probably one of the best written satires in entertainment history. The GTA universe is a grotesque reflection of our reality, the real madness. Here's just one example from the latest installment in the series:

In one mission, Michael, one of the three protagonists, is tasked with planting an explosive charge in the prototype of a new generation of smartphones on behalf of his slimy, aluminum-hatted hacker buddy Lester. So we steer our late-forty-year-old character to the nearest hipster boutique, dress him up in a ridiculous IT guy's threads (including cargo shorts and a colorful vest) and head to the headquarters of Lifeinvader - an absurd, dystopian mixture of Apple, Facebook and Google. Here we chat to an employee who becomes our Vergil in this millennial hell: In the beanbag-strewn headquarters, hacky-sack-playing, morally depraved geeks work to make the world a little worse every day.

After the work is done, our character leans back on the couch at home, lights up a cigarillo that we can almost smell. Together we watch Lifeinvader CEO Jay Norris present his new invention to a cheering crowd on live TV. They can't contain their excitement, while Norris boasts that the average Lifeinvader employee is 14.4 years old. At some point, we call this abstruse, malicious fusion of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. When he picks up on camera, the smartphone - and his skull. Our buddy Lester is delighted - after all, he bought shares from the competition.

It's stories like this that make the game series the masterpiece that it is. GTA is our world, just one to ten notches above it. Everyone gets their comeuppance here: from the yoga-addicted lifestyle Buddhist to the meth-addicted, psychopathic white-trash decal. The spectacular visuals, the martial shooting, even the eponymous car theft are basically of secondary importance. GTA is a gloss of ones and zeros.

For my part, I already have wanderlust when I think about my trip to Vice City the year after next. And until then? GTA V will probably also be available for Playstation5.