Excited for Grand Theft Auto 6? Odds are the answer is yes. With Rockstar already calling it the “largest game launch in history” over half a year out from release, I’m pretty sure the only people who aren’t feeling some kind of way about it are uncontacted in the Amazon or… they’re Steven Ogg, who played Trevor Philips in GTA 5.
In a recent, brief chat with YouTuber HarrisonShippp, Ogg was asked how excited he was for GTA 6’s release next year. “I feel nothing inside,” answered Ogg, definitively. And just in case you’re wondering if that’s a more general cry for help, he quickly made clear he was speaking specifically about GTA: “I’m not a gamer. I’ve never played a videogame, so I feel absolutely nothing.”
Which, hey, fair enough. Some voice actors get super deep into their roles—like the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3—and for others it’s just a paycheque. Neither’s an illegitimate approach, and Ogg has made clear before that he’s not keen on GTA fans essentially treating him like Trevor in real life.
But then it gets a little weirder. “I think someone said yesterday at one point, ‘You should play GTA 5,'” recounted Ogg. “I said, ‘Why?’ They said ‘Because it’s so great!’ And I said, ‘Well one day you should read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment’ and he went completely blank.”
Which is, uh, a bit of a non-sequitur, and I can’t help but wonder if Ogg’s interlocutor didn’t go “completely blank” because he was outmanoeuvred, but because countering a suggestion that you play GTA 5 with your own suggestion to read Dostoevsky is like responding to ‘You should try Indian food’ with ‘You should visit the proud nation of Denmark in autumn.’
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“Do you know Dostoevsky? Fyodor Dostoevsky?” Ogg interrogates his interviewer, who says he does not. “So there you go,” replies Ogg. “Why don’t you read that?
“Are you excited about that book coming out?” asks Ogg, of a book which was published during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. “See? It’s the same thing. Books are my thing.”
Now, I think Ogg was trying to make a point that asking him about games was like asking someone who doesn’t read books about books, but it’s certainly quite a roundabout way of going about it, and maybe a touch pretentious. The irony is, of course, that Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov—Crime and Punishment’s murderous main character—would probably be one of the most terminally online, videogame-meme-spouting nihilist weirdos in the world if he had the misfortune to exist in 2025. He sure as hell would’ve had feelings about GTA 6.
And anyway, The Idiot is better.
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