Grand Theft Auto 5: A 2022 re-review

polygon.com:

Any discussion of Grand Theft Auto 5 has to begin with scale. Not of the size of its world, or the weapons, vehicles, and people in it, but with sales data: Since its initial release in 2013, across all platforms, GTA 5 has sold something in the realm of 165 million copies worldwide. That’s a hard number to get a handle on. A little short of 40 million people live in California. If copies of GTA 5 were people, the total copies sold would be commensurate with the population of Bangladesh. The game is brain-splittingly big in its impact and its reach.

That number is only going to keep creeping up now that Grand Theft Auto 5 has launched on the newest gaming consoles (and now that new details about GTA 6 have reportedly emerged). I’ve spent the last couple months slowly playing through the game on my Xbox Series X to figure out exactly where this artifact from 2013 lands nearly a decade later.

After all, it is an artifact. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has always functioned as commentary, speaking directly to elements in mass culture, liberally borrowing the plots from different crime genre films and eras, trading on heroic melodrama and peppering these worlds with goofy violence. Vice City played up the early 2000s nostalgia for the coke-fueled party scene of the 1980s and its visual and musical industries. GTA 4 tracked an immigrant’s story into a deeply commodified culture of grifters and schemers. They each spoke to both their time and place in specific ways, parodying the mass culture of those eras while also becoming the dominant mass culture of the early 2000s.

We’re at a distance from 2013, and it is clear from here that Grand Theft Auto 5 was wrestling with this paradox: What does it mean to stick it to the man