‘I’m Shocked That People Are Still Playing’ – How GTA 5 Took Over the World

There are over 230 million copies of Grand Theft Auto 5 in the world. As the second-highest selling game of all time, it has been played for billions of hours by players across the globe, making it one of the most significant pastimes in the entire world. That’s an impressive achievement for what in 2013 was simply the highly-anticipated next entry in Rockstar’s beloved (and notorious) open-world crime series. But GTA 5 proved to be much, much more than a typical sequel. It has become home to a huge, expressive, and loyal community, one which has made a digital hobby of everything from warring alien clans to producing slick vehicle stunt movies.

This is the story of how a video game became much more than a crime simulator.

Ash Skyqueen’s avatar weaves between the traffic of busy Dorset Drive on a motorbike spouting flames. Suddenly she veers, mounting the pavement at high speed and rebounding from the roof of a bus stop to achieve incredible air. Momentum carries her through a perfect circle, barely bigger than a human body, that forms the second ‘O’ of the ‘LIQUOR HOLE’ store sign. Pulling the ripcord of her parachute, she lands with a slight stagger at the door of the rundown booze establishment on Eclipse Boulevard - a couple of streets over from where her jump began.

It’s the first feat in a stunt montage which Ash put together to celebrate ten years of GTA 5 – the game that gave her freedom, companionship and goals when she was robbed of all three. “I’d had a ruptured disc in my spine, so I was bed bound shortly after the game came out,” she says. “All day every day for about three years straight, it became my therapy in a way. You’re stuck in bed, can’t do anything, can’t work, no social life, a pretty miserable existence. And then I’m suddenly connected to a community of people doing the same thing. It kept me from going insane.”

It’s a striking demonstration of why GTA 5 has remained a deeply important game to millions of players. A pillar of pop culture, it was erected in 2013 and has loomed over the entertainment industries during every year since. Thanks to the enduring love for its single-player story campaign and its ever-popular, seemingly invincible online mode, GTA 5 has spanned three console generations and made around $10 billion dollars for publisher Take-Two – over 3 times more than the highest-grossing movie ever. When Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds made Free Guy, a Hollywood comedy about the social connection and wanton violence of online games, it was GTA they chose to riff on.

Where previous Grand Theft Auto entries were cinema-riffing crime simulators that routinely broke sales records, GTA 5 has evolved beyond those confines. It has become an alternate world where players can escape to a funhouse mirror version of LA – the most mythologised city on the planet. There they become whoever they want to be: stunt specialist, bank robber, nightclub kid, hitchhiker or filmmaker.

The GTA Campaign, Re-Tuned

In some ways, GTA 5 was a course correction for Rockstar. While 2008’s Grand Theft Auto 4 had been rapturously received, it was a narrower interpretation of what the series could be. Some players chafed against its dour and grounded tone, as well as the unforgiving driving simulation that threatened to hurl speeding players through the windscreen. It was a largely straight-faced vision that left a space for rivals like Saints Row developer Volition, who filled the vacuum with gleefully absurd city sandboxes populated by dildo-toting gangsters and gimp chariots.

GTA 5, however, saw Rockstar reclaim its lost territory in the single-player space without compromising its serious storytelling chops. The developer turned up all the dials on its screaming satire, filling its campaign missions with ludicrous plane, train, and helicopter setpieces in which the bodies hit the floor without moral consequence. The driving was made friendlier, and the oppressive skyscrapers of GTA 4 replaced by the open freeways of the San Andreas countryside. Yet GTA 5 also told the ambitious tale of three controllable protagonists at totally different points in their lives – Franklin, the young and hungry Scarface-in-waiting; Michael, the washed-up cuckold; and Trevor, the psychopathic embodiment of the five-star Wanted level.

As clear as that ambition is to see in the final product, Mike York had nothing close to a sense of that full picture when he first joined the GTA 5 development team as an animator, two and a half years before its launch.

“A lot of times during production you’re thrown in there, and you don’t know what the story is and how it plays out,” he says. “There are a lot of scenes where I didn’t even know what came before or after. I was so out of the loop with the story of the game. They just threw me a cutscene with Tanisha and Franklin and were like, ‘Hey, can you do the body animation on this?’ But I had no idea how it connected. All I knew is, ‘Damn, this girl looks mad at Franklin. She looks like she just broke up with him.’”

Even in the final six months of development, when members of the team were “all hands on deck” and testing the game for eight hours every day, it was impossible to perceive GTA 5 in its entirety.

“As a tester, you’re trying to play through the whole game over and over and over again,” York says. “But the game is very long. A lot of times I would play the game from the very beginning, up until 60% or 70%, and then a new build of the game would come out where they fixed a bunch of bugs. And so I only played the game from start to finish all the way one time, and that was after I was done from the project and played it at my house by myself.”

Only then could York finally appreciate the enormous puzzle he’d been contributing pieces to for so long. “I think the biggest thing I was shocked about was how massive it was, how big the world was, and how cool the system was of being able to switch characters,” he says. “I thought that was unique, and I knew that players hadn’t seen that before.” It’s a system that Rockstar’s peers in the triple-A sphere are only now catching up to - infusing Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows with swappable protagonists whose stories are entwined.

As an American, York appreciated Rockstar North’s Scottish perspective - an outsider’s view of the quirks and comedy inherent in LA culture. “I think they have a pretty good eye, a good touch on our society,” he says. “And that’s because, even though the main studio is in Edinburgh, a lot of the people that work there are from the US, or all they do is watch US TV shows and play US games. They’re engulfed in our culture in general. So even though they live in the UK, they have a good pulse on everything that’s going around here.”

When the midnight launch came, Ash Skyqueen and her sister stood in line at the Metrocentre shopping mall in the north-east of England. Like so many others, she took the game home and pushed it straight into the console. Behind the scenes, the development team were “stoked, walking around the office and telling people, ‘Oh my God, did you see we just sold this many?’ There were a lot of funny comments from people on YouTube channels and we were all geeking out about that.”

Simultaneously, however, Rockstar was readying to launch GTA Online - the platform that would take Los Santos multiplayer. “We were trying to get prepared for that, too,” York says. “So half of it is excitement, and the other half is trying to get some stuff done for Online.”

The Live-Service Frontier

GTA Online arrived only two weeks after its parent game and immediately ran into problems. There were difficulties with servers, crashes and lost character progress. The IGN review of the time criticised the repetitive missions and oddly mute player avatars, who contributed little to cutscenes with established GTA characters like Trevor. “I’m left with the overbearing impression,” wrote Keza MacDonald, “that Grand Theft Auto Online as it stands right now is still a colour sketch of what it will probably one day become.”

In 2017, Rockstar’s then director of design, Imran Sarwar, offered an unusually frank assessment of GTA Online’s formative period. “To be totally honest it did not begin very well at all,” he told Game Informer. “It’s one of our biggest regrets that we lost millions of players in that first year that have never experienced how much we have improved and added to the game since the early days.”

Rockstar had promised players cooperative heists – huge multistage missions featuring lavish story sequences in the mode of single-player GTA. But the company’s first attempts didn’t live up to its own standards and had to be redesigned from scratch, leading to several delays.

“GTA Online was slowly failing - and quickly losing players - right up until the middle of 2014,” Sarwar said. “The updates were not interesting enough, and as a company we did not realise how challenging it was going to be to have a team that essentially ran a content service, not make normal games.”

This is not the obvious oversight it might seem today. When GTA Online launched, the live service model was in its nascency. Fortunately, as Rockstar fumbled around trying to figure out the shape of its multiplayer platform, it had a critically acclaimed single-player game to lean on. “GTA 5 helped prop up GTA Online in the early days when Rockstar was still exploring how it wanted the online component to work,” says James McWhirter, senior games analyst at Omdia. “There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes.”

Some of those experiments were in economics. If there’s a comparison to be drawn, it’s Team Fortress 2 – the competitive FPS that Valve used as a testing ground for new business models that have since become standard in Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and a host of other games besides. Ultimately, GTA 5 has made its billions through multiple different methods.

“It’s simultaneously pulling all of those levers,” McWhirter says. “You’ve got the upfront sales for GTA 5 itself, the full game. You’ve got in-game purchases via GTA Online, and now Rockstar have begun to lean into subscriptions with GTA+.”

Details

None of that would have panned out if the GTA Online team hadn’t solved its biggest creative problem: heists. As Rockstar began to update its world with unique new stories and complex missions that demanded coordination and mastery from their players, GTA Online genuinely started to look like the future of the series rather than a flawed spin-off. Even resolutely solo players braved the servers for fear of being left behind.

“I was kind of shocked by how much extra story and missions they put into Online,” York says, who left Rockstar in 2017 – a few years before the likes of the Cayo Perico and Diamond Casino heists were added. “They really went all out, I felt, adding all kinds of stuff to do in there.”

Online Superiority

GTA Online’s turnaround and subsequent financial success came at the cost of single-player expansions. Actor Steven Ogg filmed scenes for a solo campaign that would have featured Trevor as an undercover agent, but it never emerged thanks to GTA Online sucking up many of the resources once earmarked for DLC.

“I can’t speak for the company, obviously,” York says. “But I think that they wanted to do a little bit of both. And I think they did have strong intent with DLC stuff, but the Online just did better. That happens a lot at studios, where they’ll have a DLC lined up that they’ll have plans for, and then they’ll completely shut it down because they realise something else is way more important - or they don’t even know if that DLC is going to perform well at all. They’d rather just not take the risk on it.”

GTA Online effectively took the place of traditional expansions, becoming an endgame for solo players who had exhausted every mission and diversion in GTA 5. Unusually for newcomers to an MMO, they arrived with dozens of hours of investment in its world and characters. “You know the map and where the streets are,” York says. “You finally get your own character.”

“I played it like a single-player expansion at first,” Ash Skyqueen says. “Played through everything I could by myself, and kept playing. The mechanics have always been what appeals, so it was easy to sit there and figure out what I could do.”

It’s with this spirit of exploration that GTA’s developers and players outgrew the limitations of the series’ original premise. “The more comfortable we were pushing beyond the traditional GTA concepts and experimenting more freely, we were able to introduce things like Cunning Stunts, the Special Vehicle Races, and adversary modes like Power Play, Tiny Racers, or Slasher,” Sarwar told Game Informer.

The backdrop of Los Santos, recognisable as a contemporary city only slightly adjacent to our own world, proved helpfully malleable. “One of the updates GTA Online brought in was a TrackMania style game, racing in the cloud with a top-down perspective, almost like Micro Machines,” McWhirter says. “That just wouldn’t have been possible in Red Dead Redemption. Anything with a real world analog can be realised in GTA Online, so it’s a much more potent canvas for content updates over a long period of time. Whereas Red Dead is a lot more tied to its fiction. You couldn’t have flying horses, like having flying cars added to GTA Online.”

That flexibility has enabled Rockstar to transform GTA into a platform for many different kinds of experiences, capable of holding player attention indefinitely. “Similar to Minecraft or Fortnite, it’s a virtual world first and foremost, and a game second,” McWhirter says. “In terms of GTA Online, the racing updates with the crazy track editors are a good example of how content that could perhaps normally make for a standalone game became a bolt-on for GTA Online.”

Over time, these bolt-ons have replaced smaller game releases in Rockstar’s catalogue, for better or worse. “I would consider GTA Online to be the modern day equivalent of the double-A titles that Take-Two used to push out between those blockbuster games,” McWhirter says. “If we go back to the PS3 and 360 generation, there were games like Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis and Bully, which we don’t really see anymore because teams are busy making content for GTA Online instead. Because that’s more valuable for the publisher. It helps them buy time between major GTA releases.”

More Than Multiplayer

For players like Ash Skyqueen, a new content drop in GTA Online serves a dual purpose. Beyond the extra heists and missions to play through, every update is a toy box filled with fresh animations and props to be repurposed in fan-made movies.

Skyqueen got into making machinima through her community of stunters, who made use of a modding tool named MenyooSP. “It gives you access to everything,” she says. “I can set up a secondary character, give it a list of actions and animations to carry out, and then manually control my character and do what I need to do.”

In her own movies, Skyqueen is star, stuntperson and director - the latter role enabled by the official video editor Rockstar added to GTA 5 back in 2015. One of her most popular creations, the silent short film Siren, evokes the intro cutscene of GTA 3 – following a Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple who wreak havoc as the FIB closes in. In the climax, a pre-programmed prison bus travels down the freeway - before Ash swings in on her bike to take down the convoy.

“There’s a lot of choreography involved,” she says. “I’ll often just sit there with a nine-hour long YouTube video of all the GTA story cutscenes, keeping my eye out for something that I can use in a different context.”

180,000 viewers have watched Siren. Almost a million people have watched her Liqour Hole stunt. And Skyqueen hopes Rockstar will implement some of MenyooSP’s innovations officially in GTA 6. “I know they take note of this kind of stuff, and they certainly have promoted work that’s been made with it.”

The ongoing success of GTA 5 raises questions about its eventual fate, once Rockstar’s sequel launches in November 2026. Will the studio run two versions of GTA Online simultaneously, at the risk of cannibalising its own playerbase? If not, and the GTA Online audience is migrated to a new Floridian setting, how will Rockstar account for all the properties and vehicles players have paid for?

“If a new online mode is a completely separate thing from GTA 5 Online, managing continuously between two live service games is something that is currently unproven and it could be fraught,” McWhirter says. “I think that’s probably the biggest risk for them.” The situation brings to mind the arrival of EverQuest 2 in the mid noughties, when developer Sony Online Entertainment discovered that players typically played just one MMO and stuck with it. In such a context, a sequel’s biggest threat can be its own predecessor.

“I think GTA 5 is going to solidify as one of the greatest games in history,” York says. “I think its legacy is already etched. It was revolutionary in so many aspects - in character switching and story. I’m shocked that people are still playing GTA 5, and it goes to show you how good that game is.”

While admitting to a certain amount of bias as a former member of the development team, York believes that GTA 5 will be bigger than its own sequel once the dust settles. “I feel like GTA 5 was something special in gaming culture and history, and it’s gonna leave a lasting mark,” he says. “Games will come and go around it. My intuition is that GTA 6 will come out, people will love it, but it won’t be GTA 5. And people will constantly compare it to GTA 5. It’s going to be the most nostalgic for people, it’s going to be the one that affected them most as kids. And so I just feel like GTA 5 is going to be the GTA to be remembered. It’s gonna supersede Vice City. This is the one that marked history.”

For Ash Skyqueen, who can no longer drive around a city in real life, GTA 5 is much more than a game. “It gives me that little bit of freedom back that I lost with the injury,” she says. “Though it’s simulated, it has such a good feel to it. I’ll always get on at Christmas when they turn on the snow. You’re walking around the streets at night, and it gives you that same vibe as in real life. In other games it’s just an aesthetic. But you can feel that stillness that comes with a dark snowy night. I don’t know how they do it.”

Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.