There are plenty of layers to GTA 6, if the game’s 26-minute Netflix teaser is anything to go by.
The first, of course, is what you’ll be doing. Rockstar took to Netflix in part to tell its vast audience that GTA 6 is still the GTA you love. We’re shown shoot-outs, car chases, and all kinds of charismatic low-lifes. The city is vast and filled with people to run down and pull from their bikes. Skipping between extended playthroughs and brisk, beautifully cut montages, we move from a tense gun battle in a condo-turned drug factory to scenes of people jet-skiing, riding those Everglades airboats, to base-jumping, to laying low in a parking garage as you try to shake the cops off your tail. If you want a game about knocking around a city, blasting people, chaining crime-sprees, and then screaming down alleyways until the cops have run out of vehicles to throw at you, this is still it.
But then the second layer: look at the luxuriousness of it all. GTA 6 is a world of surfaces and textures, and while you can see this in the big things – the number of cars and people on a street, the business of a heaving nightclub – you can actually see it most clearly in the little things. A friend told me recently that one of the Housers is a serious fan of Middlemarch, and you can see some of that determination to capture the world we live in down to the very slight gestures in this game.
Testify! The physics on someone’s gold chain. The stripper pole set up by the TV in a wonderfully maximalist apartment, whose fridge, when you open it, is jiggling with artfully disarrayed drinks. The signs blazing past as you roar down the street, each one with a pun worth savouring, the TV which lures you in with high budget ads for products with writer’s room-ified names like Angstipan and the Prairie Sandwich. I watched the teaser with a notebook, and as I read what I wrote down now I see a fascination with very, very specific quiet details that reminds me of the kinds of things my dad really needed to talk about when he got concussion: “the top of peoples’ heads,” I have written, and certainly, the way the hairs spiral outwards from the crown is something to be seen. “Water droplets on Land Rover doors,” I have written. I was particularly taken with the way that the condo-dwelling drug makers have hacked realistically ragged holes in the drywall to get their space the way they like it.
I could go on and on at this level, because it’s one of the game’s most thrilling. And it works so beautifully with the fact that you’re still, you know, getting in car chases and sticking to cover. But what cover! What car chases. I watched the trailer with my wife, a GTA 5 superfan, and she was so delighted by the way a pursuing cop-car flipped at an intersection. It was such an upgrade.
Yes, I love all this stuff, all these things to notice and these little details to discuss and wonder over. But what I really love is the way that the game uses the luxury of a budget that, I’ve been told, is equal to the cost of building the Burj Khalifa, to zero in on something very specific. This is another layer unfolding. All this carnage, all this gunfire, all this satire and all these glittering little bits of noticing that has brought this world together, is all in the service of a relationship.
Because this time it’s a couple’s story, and through the whole teaser we got the sense that while individual missions and scrapes and hi-jinks and whatnot were going on around Lucia and Jason, the two leads, this is still very much their personal story that we are following. There’s a Die Hard moment at a glitzy corporate event, but what sticks in the memory is a moment in it in which Lucia is flung against a wall and it leaves a bloodstain from her nose – JESUS.
There are plenty of moments where you’re following them as they drive to a mission or walk into a cut-scene, but what stands out, and what feels astonishingly expensive in videogame terms, is how easy they are with each other – clasping and unclasping hands as they walk, speaking in subtext, having a genuine relationship. Animation is great, but look at how much Rockstar can now convey when Jason keeps his head still but betrays his thoughts with a move of the eyes. The satire is no doubt overflowing on radio stations, but look at how much humanity they can get from Lucia asking Jason what she should wear before they go out, and Jason being too useless to really be able to engage with the conversation.
I love the fact that, in a silly, knockabout satire take on Florida, Rockstar is playing this part of the game straight. It’s the boldest move the team could have made, I think. It’s fascinating to see the series’ skill for observation, often used to skewer culture, being used for this: creating connection and a feeling of intimacy. (I also love the way that phones have infiltrated this world as they have ours, not just with the apps and the live streams and the influencers hiding in the trunks of cars to record a bit, but with the way that they’re just in everyone’s hands all the time, and the way a character lays back on a bed, phone held above them to scroll, one leg idly swinging back and forth.
And this is the final layer for me at least. It’s this ability to capture the little details of humans that feels so audacious and makes the game feel so bottomlessly-budgeted and luxurious. And the story that’s being told, I suspect, is of underdogs trying to have their moment, trying to get what feels like it should belong to them for all the work and all the life they’ve put into things when the world is so rigged against them. To spend all this money making something so beautifully rich and detailed, to pay billions for this game and sweat every little animation, to float it out to us on Netflix, amongst genuine discussion around whether Netflix can handle it? That’s commitment. And if you’re willing to do that, and willing to do that to tell an underdog story, you should let your workers who made everything form a union.
