As a child, Grand Theft Auto 2 was the first game I played on my Playstation. Brandon would go on to commit heinous crime for the city’s criminal lords for hours. In a city full of horrible people, being the bad guy was much more enjoyable than you could have imagined. Listening to radio on the vehicle you stole was a great way to feel the chaos and devastation in your world.
It was absolutely irreverent and I couldn’t get enough of it.
A few short years later, Rockstar Games would publish Grand Theft Auto 3 “Mind blowing” doesn’t begin to cover it. The top-down perspective was gone in favor of a 3-D, third-person world. Liberty City became your virtual playground. You can steal a car and collect weapons. Explore the city and gun down everyone without any reason. Pick up prostitutes.
What’s more, the environment was alive. It was possible to stand at a corner of the street and not do anything. Anything could happen around you, from passers-by making silly comments to a full on fight between police and robbers. What’s more, Liberty City wasn’t just a chaotic place where criminals reigned supreme. This was the only place in which there were humor, irreverence and complete lack of political correctness.
Many games would go on to adopt that anything-goes sandbox playstyle but Grand Theft Auto would stand out as the king of them all, and it’s, in part, because of that universe.
GTA is a game that masters satirization. It didn’t matter who you were, where you came from, or what you believed, chances are you were going to find yourself the butt of a joke in the game. Poor, rich, white, Republican, Democrat, and black all had their moments. It’s that irreverence in action and thought that made the game so much fun to play.
This masterclass in video game making would continue all the way into Grand Theft Auto 5, a game so vast and so in-depth that I’ve played it on and off for years and I’m still pretty sure I haven’t gotten down to the bottom of it. It’s so good, in fact, that it needs to be noted that this game came out in 2013 and Rockstar has been successfully milking it ever since.
For those who never have, or never will play a Grand Theft Auto title, it’s hard to express how fun these games are. But I can convey to you the importance of these games to our culture.
Some of you are probably reading this article and wondering why I’m heaping so much praise on a game that was labeled as one of the evilest and most dangerous titles ever released. GTA 3 saw a lot of media attention. They warned everyone that the game was teaching children how to rob, gangster, and murder. Hillary Clinton tried to ban violent games, with Rockstar Games at her center.
GTA made violent criminals out of children. The easy answer is “no.” I’m one of the billions who have played the title at some iteration and to say that the game caused my generation to become violent is laughable. Just like they said D&D and movies like Scarface would turn people who watched it into raving lunatics, GTA provided a place to escape to, a place that laughed at the world you escaped from.
This is all because I wanted to help you understand GTA, my dear reader. These games are not suitable for children. They’re immoral and no one in these games is a model citizen worthy of being imitated…but they’re fun. They don’t adhere to modern “morality,” in fact, the games constantly spit in its face and that’s a good thing. It demolished sacred cows.
South Park’s disgusting exterior had a subliminal commentary below that was refreshingly funny and could even be called fun. This is something we are in desperate need of more than ever before.
Which makes the fact that the news that it’s going woke all the more terrible.
As reported by Bounding Into Comics, Rockstar’s rockstars have more or less left the company and now it’s being run by the same people that Rockstar games used to make fun of:
After the death of George Floyd and subsequent riots, the studio allegedly halted plans for their Cops ‘n’ Crooks mode for Grand Theft Auto Online. Senior executives were concerned how releasing such a mode — where teams of players fought against each other in teams of police and criminals — would be taken at that time.
Noting that Rockstar Games had also censored allegedly transphobic content from the latest console release of Grand Theft Auto V, the outlet reports the studio had also “significantly narrowed its gender pay gap.”
Bounding Into Comics has reported that this situation gets more dire.
Rockstar Games may also be trying not to “punch down” with jokes about marginalized groups, the source claims, in contrast to prior games. While prior titles had seemingly mocked American society as a whole — with no holds bared against any group — the outlet notes how Grand Theft Auto V’s tone was a mirror to the behavior of Rockstar Games employees.
This company, which was famous for destroying sacred cows, has begun to embrace them. It is one more cultural giant to be embraced by the world.
You might not be a gamer, but you probably know this story by now as you’ve watched something you loved get devoured by woke culture. Whether it’s football, NASCAR, your favorite genre of music, movie franchises, or something else, you’ve experienced the fall of it to social justice radicalism.
Rockstar Games was meant to be one those fortresses against such things. It was a juggernaut of anti-political correctness that could always be relied upon to say the things we couldn’t say in polite society. To highlight very real absurdities regarding people or groups, it used ridiculous caricatures.
All that can be said goodbye now.
It’s a sad thing to see, but it’s just one more reason to hate woke culture and despise the people who push it on us.
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