The Daily - The Ultraviolent, Wildly Successful, Uniquely American Phenomenon of Grand Theft Auto: 13 years and a billion dollars later, the sixth installment of the blockbuster crime spree game is (almost) here.

0:00Hey, it's Michael. If you are not yet a Time Subscriber, we have some news for you. You could enjoy full access to the Times without a paywall for 30 days. All you have to do is download the New York Times app to get your first month completely free. And if you're already a Time Subscriber, thank you. From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. How are you doing?

0:42Well, look who's back. Thursday will mark the release of an entertainment blockbuster, arguably the biggest of the year. It's not a movie. It's not an album. It's a video game. Maybe some morning next time? What should I tell you to put in your calendar? Friday morning, bankrupt. Come on. Grand Theft Auto 6. This could be the start of something good. Keep your phones up.

1:12the latest edition of a franchise that has become a cultural phenomenon and a financial juggernaut. Consider this. The last installment, GTA V, racked up around $11 billion, making it one of the most profitable pieces of entertainment of any kind ever. This next installment is expected to be even bigger.

1:41Today, Zachary Small, who writes about video games for the times, explains how a game devoted to breaking the law became an American institution and why Grand Theft Auto VI might be a high watermark in the history of video games. It's Sunday, November 15th. Zachary Small, welcome to The Sunday Daily. Thank you for having me. The last time.

2:15that I played Grand Theft Auto was, I'm going to guess, eight years ago in my cousin's living room. And so my memory of it is very faint. For those who have that kind of faint relationship to this franchise, which we'll hear to forecall GTA, give us a fresh up-to-date picture of it. What makes a GTA game a GTA game? So I'm imagining you, Michael, Opening this game and you are in some fake version of Los Angeles And you're leaving your wife who is obsessed with social media and is taking selfies to go to a drug deal to fuel her buying sprees And you're gonna go to a strip club and you're gonna spend some money

3:15And then maybe you'll see a trash truck driving down the street and you'll say, I want to drive the trash truck. And you will push the person out of the driver's seat and take it and mow down people on the boardwalk. I'll hijack a garbage truck and I will use it to be extremely destructive. I mean, if you wanted to, I guess you could follow the traffic rules, but I don't think you're going to. You have all these unlimited options. You can go commit a crime. You could steal a truck.

3:47you could play basketball. So you can pursue a Tony Soprano-like version of a seemingly placid, normal, domestic life and then go off into the world of a city for crime and prostitution and the rest.

4:03You have, you know, the ability to be an absolute psychopath you're often incentivized to, but it's kind of in this drama of like a South Park or family guy. It's quite satirical about what the American dream is in American life.

4:20a drug-addled, philandering, former stuntman with multiple concussions, or a successfully divorced school teacher who knows how to talk down the normal people like a real liberal. So there's, like, on one hand, this, you know, someone who probably hates this game would call a crime simulator. But on the other hand, it is this sort of, like, virtual sandbox of America. What do you think about America, Nico? Tell me straight. You love it, no? I don't know, Roman.

4:47And what exactly is the storytelling infrastructure of this scenario you're describing? Are there stories that you're following? Are you creating the story in real time? Are there characters? Do you become the character? How does this work? Oftentimes these games have a much more complex story than you would imagine. There's one specific game where you play a recent immigrant to a city like New York and it's all about how difficult it is for an immigrant to obtain the American dream. So you have a game that is giving you criminals, but they want you to understand the complexity of these people, the reasons why they're doing the things they are. And so I think having that complexity and allowing people to explore the satire of crime and greed is really why people are pulled into this world. The last time one of these games came out was 13 years ago. People are still playing this consistently. It's a juggernaut in terms of the market and in terms of how people sort of relate to video games in the industry as a whole.

5:46So I'm starting to get a feel for what makes this game that I haven't played in many, many years so special. But tell us the story of how GTA became this juggernaut. Where does that story start? Would you believe if I told you that the story of the American dream starts in Scotland? I would be surprised. Because this story starts in Scotland in 1997. You're basically driving into...

6:15city, stealing cars, running over to the estuaries. You have a group of pretty young developers, including two brothers, Sam and Dan Hauser, who are trying to create this game that's essentially like cops and robbers. And as they're developing this game, they realize, you know what? Nobody wants to play as the cop. It's much more fun to commit crimes. And so the first Grand Theft Auto is like, it almost feels like an arcade game.

6:43And you get points for running over pedestrians and killing people. Wow. There wasn't really a lot of depth in terms of the story. Or autonomy. Right. And so they're creating this game and they hire a PR person to spread to the British tabloids that this is a scandalous game and that this is a game that glorifies violence. So it becomes this controversy in the UK. This is the legacy of Grand Theft Auto. Like if you've never played Grand Theft Auto before, you think of it as the crime simulator. And that's a little bit to the company's own fault for introducing... Or credit. Fault in credit for introducing the game that way. And what happens when this...

7:39pre-marketed as illicit rated X thing emerges in 1997. Well, everyone wants to play it, and a lot of politicians are very angry about it. The game is still selling well, though. They quickly spin out another sequel in 1999 called Grand Theft Auto II. It is much of the same. It sells well, it sells better than the first one, but the reviews are kind of middling.

8:10Where things really start running, where Grand Theft Auto becomes a zeitgeist of the culture is Grand Theft Auto 3. Grand Theft Auto 3 comes out in 2001 and this is around when you're starting to see really like, fully 3D worlds you can explore.

8:39You're in a city with different zones, and you're given full control. Remember, just watch your back in Chinatown. It's triad territory. I think a lot of the details are really what sold this game, though. You can drive your car and listen to a radio station. Of your choosing. Of your choosing, and the radio stations, the voice actors behind it are sometimes real radio jockeys, and you're listening to real radio music. This is Tony on Flashback FM.

9:09Liberty City's home for the best in disco, electro and new wave. This was not done in games. Developers were not spending the money and spending the effort to get these licenses that really make you feel like you're in a fully immersed world. This sounds really far from Super Mario Brothers where it's like ding ding ding, like getting from one...

9:34you know, chapter of the story to the other, but you're living in a very confined space in that old version of video games. Yeah, and then you're not going from left to right in this game. You're going anywhere you want. You're creating this new genre of game called the sandbox game where you're given full reign. You can follow the story missions if you want, but you could also just go off on your own. It's your sandbox. It's your sandbox. You can build your own castles, if you will. Your castles of crime.

10:02And I believe we've made this point, but it's really worth emphasizing. Everything that's happening in this game, it sounds like almost definitionally is criminal or not good. Well, let's not oversimplify things, Michael. But I would say that it's coming at you from this like...

10:25Habidian idea of freedom where like everyone is their worst selves like their basis self Yeah, and I can't overstate like that was really strange in 2001 to play a game where like you would be walking down the street in this game as your character and a Non-playable character would be walking by you and just automatically say like you're fat Like it was it was shocking like and then of course you have the ability to respond With force. With force. Exactly. I recall that when this game became part of the American zeitgeist, that dimension of it became very controversial very quickly. Yes. But it was also coming at a moment of moral panic, right? This is after the September 11 terrorist attacks. This was during a time where there were a lot of questions of sort of violence among us.

11:23there was a Domineering perspective although the research didn't support it that playing violent games would inspire violence exactly right it doesn't take a massive leap of the imagination to Think of the school council board president who says I don't like this Exactly and certainly a lot of them did I mean in 2002 when Grand Theft Auto Vice City came out which was set in this fictional version of Miami there were multiple lawsuits But if you want to talk about controversy in Grand Theft Auto, you have to talk about the hot coffee incident. Take me back to my place. I will bite. Tell me about the hot coffee incident in the history of GTA. Well, can I just tell you, in terms of my own personal history with Grand Theft Auto, I learned about this when I was like, I must have been 11 or 12, and I was sitting with my grandfather, who was reading the Wall Street Journal and just

12:20Place the newspaper in front of me and said, look at this, you play video games, this is why they're bad and will turn you like violent. The hot coffee incident came from a part of the game that developers had put in into Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The developers had created this simulated sex scene for the game. And then last minute they decided, you know, better not to put that in. So they took it out. Even for us beyond the bill. Even for us, let's not do it.

12:52They took it out of the official game, but they left the code in the game. You know, skilled gamers who understand code could still find the simulated sex scene in the game, and they could figure out how to play it. And once they did, they spread the word around. How could you not? How could you not? Everyone knows about the hot coffee controversy involving Rockstar Games, the unofficial... And so suddenly you have all these people playing...

13:21a scene that was not intended in the game. Or maybe was, because the code was left. Well, at one point was certainly intended. This is sort of like a lights with already these fears about violence in video games. Now you have sex in video games, and now you have the Federal Trade Commission asking you questions. Also politicians are using the hot coffee scandal as a way to renew calls for legislation to regulate the sale of games to minors.

13:50But Congress was upset about, and what senators like Hillary Clinton were upset about, was that they felt like the companies had misled the ratings agencies. That was the important part. The fact that you could access a simulated sex scene meant that the game should have had a higher rating.

14:15What does this controversy do to the sales of a game whose developers seem to know quite well the power of the illicit? Well, what do you think? The sales go up. They do have to settle some lawsuits. They make an undisclosed settlement with the FTC through Congress. But the sales are going through the roof. Every single game in the Grand Theft Auto series makes more money than the last.

14:43And how much money are we talking about for these games? So why don't we look at Grand Theft Auto IV, which came out in 2008. It sold 3.6 million copies in one day. Wow. And then the sales hit 6 million globally in the first week for a total haul of $500 million. That's one week. That's extraordinary. The trend continues. Later on, Grand Theft Auto V comes out. I always thought I was the good guy. God help the m- This is more successful than anyone could have predicted. In 24 hours, the game made more than $800 million. In three days, it hit the billion dollar mark. It's a video game that is shattering sales records. Never has there been an opening like this in the entertainment industry. Bigger than movies, sporting events, and concerts. Here's a little look at GTA 5. What you're describing sound like the ingredients for a very successful game.

15:45But put your finger if you can on why you think this is a transcendent blockbuster of a video game, which clearly is. I think to answer that you have to understand that the tone of this game is so unique. The idea that the whole series has its roots in controversy, it wasn't just controversy for controversy's sake, they were really trying to say something about America.

16:11And you can see that in Grand Theft Auto 5. You can see it with the characters' relationships to their own phones. You know, they might not have Facebook, but they have an app called Life Invader. They might not have X, but they have something called Bleeder. There's this real attempt to like get a genuine satire of American life right now in a way that, you know, allows you to follow protagonists who are greedy and cynical.

16:38And in going into that world, though, you're not just asked to accept them. You're asked to reckon with them, which is a very different thing. It's something that's special to video games as well. It's an arena, especially if you're trying to understand American culture today and say, like, how did we get here? It's arena for you to explore those feelings. And I think viewers have rewarded them over the years of consistency saying, We're looking at you to tell us what this crazy time we're living in is like. What it means. Exactly. That feels like an unexpected level of cultural insight and criticism to get from a video game. It's something special and I think that's why the series has become so popular. So as compelled and intrigued as I am by everything you're describing here, I think there's no substitute for playing GTA. And so in front of us is a PlayStation.

17:33where we are going to play GTA 5 and you're gonna show me how it is that I hijacked that garbage truck. It's my honor. We'll be right back. So, Zach, I couldn't think of a more perfect snack for us than Oreos. So, I think we should have an Oreo as we start to play. You know Oreos are vegan. No. Whenever I made a vegan, I go, well, you can eat Oreos. It's usually where the conversation ends because then they...

18:17They get angry and hungry. Well, maybe I should come up there and practice my backhand on your face. So as you can perhaps hear in the background, our crack team of engineers here at the Sunday Daily have wired up this room so that we can play GTA 5. And I wonder if you can just describe exactly what's on the screen. We are driving across a bridge into downtown Los Santos, which is this game's version of Los Angeles.

18:59And I have just committed Grand Theft Auto. I am driving a stolen car and looking for trouble. I'm looking for your trash truck. Ooh, your cell phone's ringing. Someone just called me. On the screen. I also just jumped out of the car by accident while trying to answer the cell phone. And now someone is... Someone has pulled a gun on you. Someone has pulled a gun. It's a cop. Ooh, a cop. I just killed the cop. And I'm gonna steal the car, his cop car. We should have given people a warning.

19:28This is the thing, like, we started this game a couple minutes ago and it already has gotten to me. There's a helicopter above me. Someone's shooting at me through the overpass. Well, I was just killed. I was wasted. So this is like in every game when you die, you're wasted. So, Michael, this is where dead men come back to life. So we start all over again. Kind of. They'll pick up.

20:01With him like I think he's probably coming out of the the police. Yep. He's coming out of jail. Michael's coming out of jail. No, I'm coming out of the medical center. Don't touch me! Oh, you don't have the call to tell me that. Not you! The Deedersack store's attending a meeting. So there you go. This is part of the story. I need you to help clear it up. Okay, so he...

20:22We have the option to go to Amanda. Yeah. All right, I'll come in. So this is trying to get us back on track with the story after we've committed something. Yeah, Amanda sounds like maybe an ex. Amanda is the wife who's just like really obsessed with becoming an influencer. Got it. Let's see where she is. Yeah, so she's up there. She's up sort of out of the main city in the Burbs. So I need, I don't have a car with me. What do you think I should do? What to do?

20:49You just suddenly you're brandishing up like an AT-47. Oh, see that's just someone who randomly got their car with a gun themselves There's just a shootout now. Yes. And so now I'm trying to get in the car. You're in the car. This is a radio call.

21:20I'm trying to take you to go shopping now. Actually, sorry, I thought we were going shopping, but this is a strip club. But some of the satire in the background is about overpriced LA life that a criminal encounters. You know, my parents never thought I would be on the daily explaining to you that we're outside of horny girls. The streetscape is very vivid. Like it really looks like Los Angeles.

21:43Yes, and they do a lot of study to make these. Like the scale, the variations. Yeah, they have urban planners that they'll consult. They'll also try and like faithfully recreate as much as they can. But you see how the neighborhoods also change. Yeah, it's becoming a little bit more fancy. Yeah, we're kind of getting into like a Beverly Hills adjacent space. The neighborhoods in this game, they're all based on Los Angeles neighborhoods, but they have different names. Oftentimes some puns. Such as?

22:11Vinewood, which is Hollywood. They also have, instead of Venice Beach, they have Vespucci. There's also, instead of Westwood, they have a neighborhood called Morningwood. We're on the wrong side of Vespucci Beach. You should know a block makes a difference. What do you need? Just a few vinewood souvenirs for my museum. He just smashed a really nice Lamborghini into like a 1975 Oldsmobile.

22:49And now into another one. You're a terrible driver. Do you want to try? Yeah, I think, I mean, I might need a little bit of coaching on this. It's complicated. But once you start going, you'll figure it out. So the triangle button is to like get into a car. So like, if you want to try and get, get into, you can get into that one. It might save you some fuel though. That's, I've just stolen a, oh wow, the console is vibrating. Yeah. How do I steer?

23:20Famous last question. Ooh, geez, that took 10 seconds to drive into a tree. That took out your windshield and mission failed. So let me... Amanda was arrested again. There's your trash truck. Oh. I know. After that, if you crash into it and then you can press triangle to get out of your car, and then triangle to steal his car. Oh, amazing. Yeah, triangle. Triangle. Yeah. Go, go, go. Tremendous.

23:55Dump it the the trash trucks name by the way is dumping in your street No, oh wait. No, I just got thrown out of it. You got to throw him back You got to hit him. You got to knock him out. Yeah, there you go You're a natural at this. Oh Wow, this is tremendous. Oh my god. You see the blood-splirting ass spreading out of there. I don't know you're catching on to this pretty quickly Here we go. I got myself a garbage truck Okay, I gotta slow down cuz I'm just gonna All right, but this is what a lot of people's like first hours with this game are is just like being Getting used to the controls but also like being shocked by how interactive the world is completely But I just do want to describe how my basis instinct is coming into play like I you just know I just decided to take out this motorcyclist Because I could I mean like I could not have but I could that's really funny because and I might be in the my own already here I really do try and play this game and abide by the traffic rules

24:56That says a lot more about you than it does about, yeah. It says a lot about both of us, I suppose. But you can see how people play like this for hours without like doing any mission. Oh geez, I'm gonna spend 10 minutes just figuring out how to get this dump truck out of this intersection. Everyone plays this differently but you're kind of playing it like the parallel parking simulator. I'm outta here, I'm outta here. Yeah, okay.

25:24You can see the trash falling out of the truck as you make your getaway. I've totally mastered the driving part now. Oh geez. I just flipped the truck over. So this is like a day in the life of Grand Theft Auto. Just to give you the global view here, this is like an early mission. It's only gonna get weirder from here. And so for the new game, like, you know, people are just imagining, if this is how crazy fake LA is, how crazy is fake Miami? And now that I've got a sense of how good and mesmerizing. GTA 5 is, I can only imagine, what this next version that has been developed over 13 long years must be like, and I bet it's rather impressive. Let's talk about it. I just feel like I'm in my parents' basement in like 1996, eating Oreos, playing video games with you. I'm so glad I became an investigative reporter at The New York Times to do this. Okay, Zach, I'm a lot more familiar with GTA.

26:42I now truly understand why it is such a hit. It's immersive. It's a sandbox. It's a choose your own adventure romp. It's a delicious parody of American life. I get it. We just played GTA 5. The big question I have is, why on earth did it take 13 years for this next generation of this franchise, GTA 6, to come out? In a sentence?

27:12Everything's really expensive and hard to do. The reality here is that to make a video game, even in, you know, 2013, let alone 2026, the technology is so advanced and so expensive and requires thousands of people to work on it that any major game today, the development timeline is usually six to seven years. Wow. That's become accepted. What we just played, like, just think about it. You got in a car and you sped off.

27:44by the airport where we can get a tow truck. How much work do you think goes in to getting in a car and speeding off in a game? I have no idea. Once you start parsing it out, though, you're thinking, OK, what are the physics? What's the physics engine in this game? Who developed the physics engine? Who decides what speed that car is going? Who makes the animation? What if the character is getting in from the right side versus the left side? Towed truck is at the left. Already, I've given you an overwhelming number of options. And each one of those, of course, has about 1,000 other things that a developer and animator would have to do. That requires hundreds of man hours. And today, because we expect or the consumer expects realistic, sophisticated games, I mean, this is a AAA game. And by AAA, you mean what? It's like a blockbuster movie. It's like the biggest budget production. And you get to 13 years. You get to 13 years and you get to a budget that people estimate to be around a billion dollars.

28:41just for this latest version of GTA. Yeah, it's like, you know, video games, Cleopatra budget. What have you come to know about GTA 6 and so far as we've either been able to play it or glimpse it or it's been described to you? What is all that time and money given us? You know, as someone who reports on video games and also plays video games, I've seen, I've seen a few in my day.

29:08What I have seen both in previews and sort of in first-hand demos has actually been astonishing. The level of detail that goes into these places. We were just on the beach in Grand Theft Auto 5. We didn't see a lot of people. No. Grand Theft Auto 6 has like a true Miami Beach stuffed with people of all shapes and sizes, having individual conversations, They're playing fetch with their dog who runs into the wave and the wave splashes against the dog. They're throwing the beach ball and it makes an imprint in the sand. Like the amount of work, once you start thinking of how hard it is to make anything in a video game, really blows your mind. I think of what I just played as something that artificial intelligence would really accelerate. It seems like precisely the thing that the AI coding world.

29:59would catalyze. It's not? Not yet. Many companies, because of how expensive it is to produce games, are hoping that AI can help them cut some corners. In my reporting, a lot of places where that's going to happen, though, are not necessarily on the big development costs. You know, maybe instead of hiring play testers to find all the glitches in your game, you can have an AI agent run through things, for example. But the cost of production has skyrocketed.

30:27So even if you have a game that's super successful, a best seller, the studio may still shut down because they haven't made enough money, which leaves everyone in this sort of trap. I mean, the industry has had over 30,000 layoffs in about two years. They're calling it a crash. Executives are calling it a crash. And yet we're here on the brink of one of the biggest game releases or truly anticipated to be the biggest entertainment release ever. What happened to the rest of the non-GTA video game industry that means there have been all these layoffs? So on average AAA game you could imagine the budgets are around 200 million dollars. It's like you're producing a Marvel movie and you're taking six years to make it. In those six years you have to anticipate what viewers will want. Oftentimes that gamble does not

31:25pay off and we've seen that in these stratospheric mistakes. Would you just give me an example? So for example, Sony had a game called Concord and it was a shooting game, let's say. It came out, it had a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. They shut it down in about two weeks. Wow. That's how badly the sales were. They took it off because the sales were so bad and they didn't want to pay for it to be, it was like a live service game to be streamed. So it was taken off the air.

31:55They ate that loss. They missed the mark. They missed the mark. What about conquered? Didn't work. It's the competition in that space. I mean these games like if they don't pop off immediately, there's not really such a thing as like steady growth, right? You can have a cult game, you know that becomes popular, but it's not gonna make back the $300 million budget. Exactly. So it's easier for them in some cases to just cut the cost completely.

32:24Competition at the same time, which is coming from other studios or countries such as China, they're creating games that are free to play. So like, they're not technically amazing games. You could play it on your phone, but they're community games. So there's things like Roblox you might have heard of or Fortnite. And you don't have to pay to get into it. You pay for like character costumes or weapons, whatever. That's how they make their money.

32:54It's pulling so many players. So the audience has decreased. The audience for these prestige games, let's call it, has also gotten older. So there's a narrowing. There's a mature market that's happening where they've lost the audience. The product is too expensive to produce. And AI, while it has some promise to cut costs, is not so significant.

33:19AI has actually built another challenge, which is that to create these games or to even develop the machines to play the games, they use the same hardware that AI companies need for their servers. So the cost of all of that hardware has gone up. Consoles have increased their prices by hundreds of dollars, when usually within the lifespan of this product, the price is supposed to go down. So we should see GTA.

33:46and the expected success of GTA VI as an outlier. And perhaps, maybe, am I overstating this? The marking of the end of an era in video gaming? It really could be the last of its kind. Just say more about that. It's the last of its kind in that this, it's perhaps the last true prestige game where the developers have sought to create something worthy of an Oscar, you know, that has all of these different elements that are artisanal, right? Like artisanal shadows and lighting. It just requires such an immense amount of effort that it's unclear to developers who I've spoken to that their own studios could make the same thing and make enough money to make it worth it.

34:44So will there be a GTA 7, 8, 9, 10, 11? It's unclear is the truth. It might be the only one of this scale to continue on, but that's just because, again, this is sort of an elite of its own. The industry is hoping, as the saying is, that the rising tide can lift all boats. They're hoping that Grand Theft Auto can sort of be a salvation to the industry. But does that seem likely?

35:12You know, you can't just bet on like one game to do this. We're also in an affordability crisis where the consoles and games have gotten more expensive. You know, games used to be $60 just a couple years ago. Now most games, most new releases are priced around $80 or $70. People are people are choosing not to buy them. I'm sure many people listening to us will think that If video games of this sort wither away, it's not going to mean all that much to them. They may not spend that much time playing these games, as you could tell from my driving. I don't spend a lot of time playing these games. So for them, explain what in your mind is lost if video games of this kind go away. Well, economically, you're losing billions of dollars quite literally.

36:11It's hurting a major sector of the economy and an industry that's bigger than music and movies combined. Wow. Culturally, you will be damaging in an art form that people spend hours and hours and hours with. So even if you don't play it, you're talking to people that could spend 100 hours in a given game.

36:35We've talked a lot about Grand Theft Auto and the controversies, but also some of the merits of the story that it tells. And so to lose that, it's a similar thing as people are looking at Hollywood and the budget crisis is there. Where do artists get an outlet today? Right. Can't all be painters. Some of them are going to be designing that shadow against the wall in that video game. Some of them will be, yeah.

37:04it sounds like a lot of them have lost their job over the last few years. Yes, but in terms of Grand Theft Auto and its studio Rockstar Games, I mean, this game has probably had close to 10,000 people working on it. And they've been very steadily working on it over 13 years. Like the size and the scope here is really significant. And I think the question for a lot of people will be, can the studio sustain itself off of the sales of this game?

37:34Well, just to end our conversation here, let's talk about the game itself, GTA 6. What do you know about this game? Have you played it? I have watched people play it. That's as close as they'll let you get? That is as close as they'll let you get in the Rockstar Studios. The way this is handled is as if they had the Pentagon Papers. You walk in, they want you to sign an NDA to see it.

37:59I as a New York Times reporter did not sign the NDA. Could you just kind of like broadly move your hand across a piece of paper as if you were signing it? I said that's really interesting, but I can't. Because then you couldn't talk to us about it. Exactly. You know in terms of what I saw though, it's what I can speak about is what is also seen in some of the trailers as well is just like they understand that Grand Theft Auto as much as it is a game that you play is also a zeitgeist and they've tried to live up to the expectation of Grand Theft Auto as being sort of like a second life, you know, you in the virtual world. If you go to a convenience store, there's going to be like 45 options of different food and drinks that you can get. Maybe you start vaping while you're in there and you open up one of the magazines in the kiosk and there's like a full magazine for you to read through with fake articles inside of it. No New York Times, I did check.

38:57but their own magazines. So I think it's just like this game is going to show people what is possible when you have what is essentially an unlimited budget. Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned that GTA 5 felt like a cultural commentary from what you've been able to see of GTA 6. What is the comment it's making about America, about Florida?

39:25Well, you know there are alligators and nudist colonies in the game which you can experience yourself You know they're playing around certainly with the stereotype of the Florida man for example in the game But I do think it Grand Theft Auto 6. It's really a Bonnie and Clyde story.

39:55You control these two characters, a man and a woman, who can be in a relationship if you want them to. And these two criminals that are just trying to make it in a situation that's incredibly difficult to. I think there's also elements of the game that lean heavily into surveillance culture. In previous games, if you robbed a store, you just got to get away from the cops. Here, there are cameras.

40:22There are a lot of surveillance cameras. There are people with their phones taking videos of you as you're committing a crime. So, like, in a way, I think that feels really true to the moment today. Wait, did you steal my friend's car? Yeah. Holy s***, Chad! What do I do? Jesus. If cynicism and greed and crime were the bywords of GTA up until now, is there a newer dad? That's a great question.

40:51cynicism and greed are definitely still in play. I think this game, in terms of it feeling more grounded, also has a little bit of hope in it. Of what sort? Of making it. This could be the start of something good. Keep your phones on. Does this mean we're in this crew? Yeah, I think so. You think he can help us? We don't have any better ideas, do we?

41:20You know, I think, again, where the country is right now of people being worried about affordability or prices, having a game where they fantasize about being these criminals in Florida, trying to make a big score. There is something there as tainted as it might be to talk about crimes this way. There is an element of hope. Isaac, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

41:56This episode was produced by Alex Barron, with help from Lena Richards. It was edited by Wendy Doar, contains music from Dan Powell, and was engineered by Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Wilder Barron. That's it for the Sunday Daily. I'm Michael Babaro. See you tomorrow.