I reflect fondly on two particular videogame moments that defined the earliest stretches of pandemic lockdowns five years ago. For fans of GTA Online, the alien gang wars of 2020 live long in the memory. For Fortnite aficionados, who could forget Travis Scott’s jaw-dropping in-game Astronomical event?
One scripted, one very-much-not, but two watershed moments in open-world games this decade. Now, as we slouch slowly but surely towards GTA 6 (on console, at least; a PC launch date still lingers in the ether) and the promise of whatever shape its own online offshoot might take, the idea of balancing the invented with the inadvertent excites me to no end. With that in mind, low-key Rockstar partnerships dance at the forefront of my imagination.
Wheels of steel
You see, no matter how well-executed Rockstar’s blockbuster GTA Online updates have been in more recent years, there’s something brilliant about its most unhinged but unplanned moments on the streets of San Andreas. The game’s servers can be harrowing places with infuriating hackers and hoverbike griefers lurking above and below, but sessions often shine in their bouts of unscripted second-to-second destruction. You’ve seen it yourself when a helicopter is rocket-launchered out of the sky, only to land on another player’s car just as they’re tossing umpteen grenades into the forecourt of a gas station because, well, why not —and I hardly need to leave the rest to your imagination.
The alien gang wars of 2020 were an extension of this. What started out as a small troupe of Green Martian Bodysuit-wearing players tooled up with baseball bats terrorising others, quickly grew into an explosive mass-server conflict between millions of players. The whole thing was well-documented on Instagram Reels and TikTok, and grew arms and legs when a competing Purple Martian Bodysuit-donning faction surfaced to police the greens.
Sessions often shine in their bouts of unscripted second-to-second destruction.
This all took place in the game’s official GTA Online servers, but the most streamlined example of Rockstar giving players the tools to create (and destroy) is epitomised best in its roleplay servers, where I’ve spent countless hours pretending to be someone else in misadventurous tales that sit among my all-time favourite video game moments over the last 35 years of play. On August 11, 2023, Rockstar acquired Cfx.re, the community mod team behind FiveM and RedM—two of the best-known roleplay spaces wherein inventive creators bend both games so much that they become unrecognisable—meaning we’ll almost certainly see a dedicated space for RP in GTA 6/GTA Online 2.0 in some shape or form.
In the same way Rockstar already highlights creator content in Newswire posts and on social media, better signposting in this space will help us more easily identify what’s popular in the roleplay scene at any given moment, whereas the promise of helping to “improve the services [the roleplay community] provides to their developers and players”, as per Rockstar itself, could help improve factors such as stability. From the player’s point of view, there’s the obvious worry that Rockstar will strive to monetise what’s always been a hobbyist endeavour up to now, but with an official focus on roleplay, the scope to attract more people to the roleplaying community naturally broadens, as does what might be possible in-game.
On May 24, 2021, Rockstar partnered with one the most recognised names in the world of dance music, CircoLoco. With CircoLoco Records, Rockstar promised it was “further fusing the physical and digital worlds of entertainment” by building on the success of GTA Online’s After Hours update, as well as the catalogue of top real-world musicians who’ve lent their talents to the crime series’ in-game radio stations throughout the last 25 years. A bustling dance hall featured in the first GTA 6 trailer that dropped at the end of 2023, offering a quick glimpse of life after dark in Vice City. And with the likes of Jamie Jones, Moodyman, Adam Beyer, Peggy Gou, Seth Troxler and Kerri Chandler all attached to the label, it seems likely Rockstar will go all in on its new sandbox’s nightlife.
Looking over the open-world fence at Fortnite, and its strides into the live event space over the last several years have been nothing short of remarkable. The Travis Scott-starring Astronomical event of 2020 was a breath-taking endeavour that saw a towering, over-sized version of American rapper drop hits like Sicko Mode, Highest in the Room, and Stargazing, while rocking his signature mocha/white Air Jordan 1s as clusters of players gathered at his feet, or flew around the portion of the map dedicated to the show, nodding their head from one beat to the next. According to Epic Games, 12.3 million people tuned in simultaneously for the premiere, and, after five in-game shows, spanning three days, digital Travis accrued 27.7 million unique viewers and 45.8 million views all told, taking into account players who watched the gig more than once.
It seems likely Rockstar will go all in on its new sandbox’s nightlife.
Grand Theft Auto is its own thing, with GTA 6 set to be a new beast altogether, but it certainly has the gravitas to deliver something similar in scope—not least with its multi-million-dollar licensing deals, and the series’ gorgeous pseudo slant on real-world USA. The house and techno music scenes are massive in real-life Miami, and so it’s not a huge leap to speculate that Leonidis, GTA 6’s pseud-slant on Florida, might reflect the same with CircoLoco Records at the helm.
Beyond more run-of-the-mill business-running ventures, a la the After Hours update, the idea that a spin on the Ultra music festival (a huge EDM event in Miami) could be replicated in-game is well within the realms of possibility. Take the creative latitude the Grand Theft Auto roleplay spectrum could afford in user-generated content terms, and it feels like the sky really is the limit.
Time will inevitably tell how Rockstar supplements GTA 6 with an online component, and while it seems unlikely GTA Online in its current Los Santos-dwelling state will cease to exist with any degree of urgency—because, quite simply, it earns the developer a heck of a lot of money—the potential that underlines the next step is absolutely certain. You would have to assume FiveM will feature in some capacity on consoles, but it is absolutely primed for PC meaning while a desktop launch date remains unconfirmed, it’s surely a matter of when not if. While we wait, I’ll be ironing my neon green alien suit with half an eye on the sky for flying motorbikes.
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