“If you look into the research done by folks like myself, 50-plus-year-olds are not into hyperviolent content, but the way simulates the world draws them in,” De Schutter says.īut as captivating as the GTA games and their worlds can be, De Schutter says they have a dark side as well. The worlds in GTA are so immersive that De Schutter notes that even players in the over-50 age demographic that he studies often mention that GTA was the series that got them to start playing video games. “Rockstar does that really well, trying to find that balance between movie realism and real-life realism and building up that way,” De Schutter adds. “It was something that once you started playing you had a hard time putting down because they had the same kind of narrative structure as a drama movie with multiple plot lines being interwoven with each other,” De Schutter says. heist epic “Grand Theft Auto 5,” De Schutter says Rockstar has created a new standard for cinematic storytelling in games. From the Miami crime movie flavor of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” to the immigrant gangster story of “Grand Theft Auto 4” and L.A. “GTA 3” also set the tone for the kinds of expansive, cinematic stories Rockstar would continue to tell with the series. “It was the Euphoria game engine that was used when came out, and everyone was like, ‘Jesus Christ.’ They won so many awards just for what they did with rendering a 3D world.” “It was just such an amazing achievement, and every iteration of GTA was just another amazing technical achievement as well,” De Schutter says. It essentially put the idea of open world design into the mainstream, ushering in a new age of big budget games with massive virtual worlds to explore. “GTA 3” took a freely explorable world, in this case the fictionalized New York City-inspired Liberty City, and put it in three dimensions. “Everything changed with ‘GTA 3,’” De Schutter says. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University Bob De Schutter, an associate professor of art and design at Northeastern University who specializes in games, says GTA has shaped the last few decades of big budget game design, starting with “Grand Theft Auto 3” in 2001.īob de Schutter, associate professor of art and design at Northeastern University. GTA is big business, but the franchise’s impact goes beyond the business of gaming. The franchise as a whole has sold 400 million units, 180 million of which are “GTA 5,” according to a quarterly earnings report from Rockstar parent company Take Two. “Grand Theft Auto 5,” the last entry in the series, came out in 2013 and hit $1 billion in retail sales in three days, shattering records. The series has been an unequivocal success for Rockstar and the industry. To answer that, it helps to understand GTA’s complicated legacy. But will “GTA 6” elevate the series’ legacy and gaming as a whole or get stuck in the more problematic aspects of its history? For dedicated and casual gamers, that’s not just a big deal but cause for celebration.Ĭinematic storytelling and groundbreaking technology, a provocative, rockstar attitude and ensuing moral panic: Grand Theft Auto has been central to pop culture for the last 30 years. After a decade of anticipation, Rockstar Games gave the world its first glimpse of “ Grand Theft Auto 6” this week.
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