To people younger than mid-30s: I really cannot emphasize enough that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City played a huge shaping effect on later ‘80s retro and those weird Scottish Ameriboos at Rockstar left the legacy that they have now set some of the actual America’s actual sense of cultural history

Thinking about how Rockstar Games is our Martin Scorcese not just because they’re period-and-setting-detailed crime stories about American culture but because they’re increasingly specifically downfall stories – The Red Dead Redemptions, L.A. Noire, Lost & The Damned, even the base GTA4 at the end.

Compare with how Vice City climaxed in a reenactment of the “say hello to my little friend” Scarface scene but winnable

Been thinking back over the RDR2 single-player campaign.

Something that jumped out at me – Rockstar games always had a strong sense of time and place but they used to filter that through preexisting movies about the setting and now they take on that first-order role and treat history directly, and that’s a big change

GTA3 was New York crime as filtered through Coppola and Scorcese and other gangster movies; Vice City was Scarface and Miami Vice. San Andreas lifted its aesthetics from gangsta rap and Hughes brothers movies. Even RDR1 leaned heavy on Peckinpah and spaghetti westerns

(Bully, I suppose, comes off as an entry in the British “school days” novel genre from someone who grew up in Trainspotting-era Manchester, transposed to the United States)

But starting with GTA4 it feels like they decided to try to grab the zeitgeist barehanded and honestly? I’m not sure it works. 4’s “modern New York, with immigrants shaped by post-Soviet chaos” is a real thing, but not really a resonant thing. In 5 Franklin’s lament that people still have an image of south LA as mid-90s ghetto while it’s solidly lower-middle-class and climbing is accurate but doesn’t really build into something; Trevor and Michael could be a metacommentary on the two traditional threads in Rockstar vidya - anarchic violence and domesticated interior plot - if you squint, but you have to squint.

I noticed this thinking of how RDR2 checked off so many boxes on “what was happening in late-19th cen America as the frontier closed” - you’ve got your Chinese workers building a railroad over here, your reintegration of the unchastened South over here, your resource magnates consolidating here, your German immigration important to the Great Plains here, your native tribes (who integrated freemen after emancipation) being moved on again from first-wave reservations here…

It’s probably newer (or more easily missed) to people w/o my interest in American history, and more subtle and better done than a lot of contemporary AAA stuff – in a lot of cases there’s a parallelism to Arthur and his band that’s used to play with things, one mission sequence is retrieving things for a dispossessed old man and it really leans into his self-pity and what he’s lost but the final twist is he was a slavecatcher and Arthur’s righteously angry, y’know his band idealizes freedom; and anyway a bit later you’re mourning the good old days of freedom… to be a bandit… in between breaking lives for economic reasons and capturing fugitives… it’s like “oh, hm”

But still for all that it’s box checking - yeah, we fit that in, and it just builds up into a pile, and I think it could’ve made a good revisionist Western out of any one of those things instead

(Well it does have heist movie pacing, like GTAV did, that’s something)

(alt.: it’s plenty Scorcese, just later indulgent Gangs of New York/The Aviator Scorcese)

Rockstar Games, the Scottish-founded makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, always liked tweaking America but as time goes on they’re really turning into our generation’s Martin Scorsese, specializing in crime stories set against the backdrop of interesting and half-forgotten moments in American history.

The sixth-generation console games were still, rather than invoking American culture directly, riffing off previous riffs on it - GTA3 on Mafia movies; Vice City on Miami Vice, Scarface and neo(n) noir; San Andreas on hood films and gangsta rap imagery. Bully, even if officially set in New England, was more about British “public school” culture than anything.

But with GTA4 you started seeing them branching out and taking on things that hadn’t really been treated before, in this case “the new, Slavic wave of immigration to New York City” and “ethnic conflict in the Balkans after the collapse of the Cold War system”. I think they ran into the same problem as DS9, that that latter one’s not actually A Thing in American culture, and it would’ve been more true and interesting of them to hang a lampshade on the fact that no one actually cared what Niko saw or did in the old country. This might be the Scottishness coming into play - growing up close to Norn Iron during The Troubles, “ethnic conflict orthogonal to imperial geopolitics” was probably more resonant to the developers.

L.A. Noire was the late ‘40s, specifically as a bridge between WWII and the ‘50s - dramatizing how and why a nation traumatized by Depression and war might actively *want* to escape to a scripted conformist consumerism, and how this scripting was developed and implemented by a culture industry and military/corporate elite that had actually been fairly insulated from the trauma.

Red Dead Redemption (the best of this generation imho) was about the closing of the frontier, the end of cowboy culture and agrarian yeomanry in general, the growth of federal authority, the historically porous Texas-Mexican border, and the way the Mexican Revolution bled across it.

GTAV was, eh. You can tell they were first overambitious and later rushed, trying to push it out the door before the next generation of consoles showed up and obsoleted their efforts. There’s too many redundant characters - each of the three mains have supporting casts that reuse roles and traits before being completely abandoned by the plot. And as the demand for clever writing expanded beyond missions and radio bits to also include websites, facebook posts, tweets, overheard street chatter, TV shows, and phone conversations between each character pairing after each mission, you just got too many cases of the same themes being reused, executed far too on-the-nose. Michael’s “ex-criminal turned family man dragged back into the game by the authorities” plot hit too many of John Marston’s beats, and I can’t help thinking that the Mirror Park, “UCLA”, and northwestern coast environments were supposed to be settings for missions.

For all that there were some high points. “Did Somebody Say Yoga” used a throwaway minigame and 0-challenge driving to set you up for some impressive sucker-punch plot twists and tone shifts, which is something I’ve only seen AAA games do before in, of all things, the Call of Duty series. The conversation where Michael tells Trevor that he’s a hipster was brilliant. Trevor in general, and his Canadian shame/pride in specific, were both hilarious and well-done. The one place where they really deliver the “insights into American culture” is with Franklin - the fact that south LA has changed since the ‘90s, the community’s becoming both more gentrified from outside and more lower- to middle-middle class from within, young black hooligans are now more skate punk than gangbanger, crackheads and OGs are aging and increasingly pitiful and marginal figures, the face of “ethnic crime” is now Near Easterners pulling white-collar scams, and the real crazy violence is out in the high desert, but that no one from outside seems to have internalized this, still going off second- and third-hand gangsta rap-era impressions. That’s pretty fucking dead on, actually.