As we've already discussed, I regard the personal automobile as a vector of poisonous ideology. Its beneficent alternative? The train: socialised, communal, predictable, subject to the gentle yet firm hand of rational state planning. If the world had more trains in it, we wouldn't be where we are now. We'd be somewhere else. On account of catching the train.

I have converted Grand Theft Auto 5's Franklin Clinton into one of the hero-drivers of these great iron beasts. I have installed Los Santos Metro Driver, which transforms Rockstar's opus from crime sim to train sim. Or tram sim, I guess. Same thing. The city's denizens need to move between airport terminals and only man can help them do it (you are that man).

Did you know driving trains, like, sucks? It's hard. You'd think it'd be easy, what with being essentially glued to your surface of operation, but I have spent most of my career as a trainee train-er overshooting platforms, accidentally applying the emergency brake, and sometimes running over passengers. Which, whatever.

It is an almost alarmingly detailed simulation. You gather driver XP with which you ascend to new heights of train mastery. You are paid a wage. Your pay is docked if you overshoot stations. Crushing customers to paste doesn't seem to affect much.

Also, did you know train magic disrupts teleportation magic? My teleport-every-50-seconds mod remains in effect, the countdown timer glowing ominously on my screen in the midst of everything I do. And yet, somehow, while driving a train it is thwarted. It is a pleasant and newfound freedom, just one of the many positives of the train life.

Bring Up The Bodies, often regarded as Hilary Mantel's masterpiece (more of a Place Of Greater Safety man myself), opens thus: "His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze".

This is a description of Thomas Cromwell's falcons in 1535. It is also a description of the life of Franklin Clinton in 2026. Los Santos is awash in bodies because I have installed PeopleFalling – BloodSky, a mod which sends an endless wave of people plummeting to Earth like a horrible hard rain. "A modification called 'People Falling' or as I call it, 'Blood Sky'", writes the author, confusingly, as they presumably chose both names.

"When you press the 'X' key, characters drop from the sky. You can change the activation button in the .ini file". This is a lie. It's actually the B key. My relationship with PeopleFalling AKA BloodSky got off to a rocky start.

It does work though. Sort of. Tap B (not X) and the rainy season begins—people fall silently to the ground in a kind of reverse-Rapture situation, absolutely all of them physics-free and adopting the same stomach-sleeper position when they finally make contact with sidewalk, with highway, with rooftop.

Then it ends, and no matter how much you tap B—notifications reading "Falling people Active" and "Falling People Deactive" flashing in the lower right of your screen—they never come back. It's like you have witnessed a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime miracle, like a full solar eclipse or Halley's comet.

Also, when the process is ongoing it really alarms my bodyguard, who responds like a dog hearing a bang in the house at night.

It goes without saying (yet here I am saying it) that Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be huge. We don't really have a sense as to just how huge at this point: Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has boasted that GTA 6 preorder numbers are "unprecedented," but he's refused to provide specifics because "the raw numbers could be potentially misleading." But huge, for sure.

Now both Sony and Xbox have joined in the 'gonna be huge' chorus, each of them announcing that preorders for GTA 6 are, definitionally, unprecedented.

"Grand Theft Auto 6 is now the most pre-ordered game in the history of PlayStation Store," Sony proclaimed on the PlayStation Blog. "Given this unprecedented demand, we’ve joined with Rockstar Games to allow players to start pre-loading the game nine days early, so they’re ready to play on launch day. We’ve also adopted a rolling midnight launch by country, beginning at 12:00AM NZDT in New Zealand and running across the globe as respective countries hit midnight on November 19."

Xbox made a similar announcement on its own website, calling GTA 6 "the most pre-ordered title of all time on the Microsoft Store" and encouraging users to begin preloading as soon as possible because of "the unprecedented demand" for the game.

Alongside Xbox Series X/S consoles, Xbox said GTA 6 will also be playable on Xbox One consoles through Xbox Cloud Gaming. That service is also available on PC, but Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Bell confirmed in October that GTA 6 will not be streamable on our platform.

But while nobody is serving up specifics on the number of GTA 6 copies sold via preorder, we do have a rough indicator of how much money Take-Two expects to make when it comes out of the gate. The publisher is projecting net bookings of $3.35 to $3.5 billion for its current fiscal quarter, "driven by the groundbreaking release of Grand Theft Auto 6" on November 19. That's roughly double what Take-Two took in during the same quarter in its previous year, when it reported net bookings of $1.76 billion.

"The launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 is ten days away and, with pre-orders continuing to reach unprecedented levels, we expect to deliver an historic year for our company," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said during yesterday's quarterly financial report.

Take-Two is also projecting a comparably huge net bookings increase for its full year: The company reported total net bookings of $6.72 billion for its 2026 fiscal year, and is currently projecting $8 to $8.2 billion for 2027.

Developer of entertainment products and pillar of the global economy Rockstar has announced that Grand Theft Auto 6, its much-ballyhooed upcoming Bonnie and Clyde simulator, will be targeting 30 frames per second on consoles. Coincidentally, "on consoles" is the only place Rockstar has currently announced the game is releasing, so GTA 6 is a 30-fps-or-bust experience for the foreseeable future.

"Grand Theft Auto 6 has been fully developed from the ground up to provide the best possible experience for the current generation of consoles, targeting 30 frames per second while pushing both platforms to their absolute limits to bring the vast and rich world of Leonida to life", say the boys and girls in Edinburgh, while offering a little sweet treat to PlayStation 5 Pro owners in the form of PSSR (PlayStation of Soviet Socialist Republics—no, wait, sorry, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) support and ray-traced shadows.

Why am I telling you this on PC Gamer dot com? Partially because the traffic gods would beat me with a roll of pennies in a sock if I passed up an opportunity to write about GTA 6, but mostly because I'm very smug, and wish to subject other people to that.

Let's be real, the odds that GTA 6 was gonna target 60 fps on the box you have under your TV were always slim to none, but hearing it makes me feel more vindicated in my choice to wait for the game to hit PC than ever. I'm sure Rockstar's tech magi will make it a very nice 30 fps indeed, but my TV has 120 hertz in it. My monitor? 144, which I gather is kind of on the low end these days.

When it comes time for me to luxuriate in the lights of Leonida, I want to do it with maximum butteriness, I want all the bells and whistles set to 'on', and I want to do it on a proper gaming platform (German Linux). I'm excited to hear people's reports about what this game's actually like when it finally hits consoles in just over a week, but personally? I've never been happier about my choice to wait for GTA 6's inevitable but unannounced PC port.

Just when you thought the celebrations for Grand Theft Auto 6 couldn't get any more extravagant, Rockstar has announced that it will be hosting a huge music festival in Miami just a few days after its release. But that begs the question: who's going to turn up? I thought everyone was going to be playing GTA 6?

"Experience the music of Vice City and Leonida at Grand Theft Auto VI: The Festival, a special live event on November 21 at Mana Wynwood in Miami to celebrate the launch of GTAVI, featuring a star-studded lineup of artists from the game and the official soundtrack," an official blog post reads.

The event is in partnership with PlayStation and will feature "two stages of nonstop music performances" with the following artists:

Tickets will be available via a lottery system for those aged 17+ with exclusive codes being sent out to those who managed to win a spot when the entries are drawn on today at 4 pm ET/ 9 pm GMT. But there are a couple things to keep in mind. There's no word on how expensive the tickets will be, with prices likely being revealed later today in the lottery, and the festival is a mere two weeks away, as it takes place on November 21, 2026.

So, unless you're a super fan with money to spare on not only a festival ticket but also a last-minute plane ticket to Miami, this event will likely be for locals or, at the very least, those already in the US. My only issue is that if you're so big a fan that you're willing to drop everything last minute and head over to Florida then why aren't you actually playing GTA 6? The festival is happening just two days after GTA 6, I'm pretty sure we're all busy around then.

It's almost here. It's almost here. Look down at your glass of water, see the ripples as it approaches. Turn your face to the wind, scent the faintest whiff of it as it slouches towards your PlayStation to be born. That's the reek of money.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost here, at which point humankind will be absolved of its sins and redeemed to Eden. Or something. I lose track, but people are very excited, and it's got me a little concerned for the future of my beloved GTA 5. What is the future of GTA 5 in a world of GTA 6's imminence? What's its present?

Like the rest of us, its present must aggressively reorient itself around GTA 6. GTA 5 is a GTA 6 countdown app now. I have installed GTA VI Countdown.

In Legion Square (which is a place in Los Santos, apparently): an obelisk to man's hubris. A holographic display looms in the centre, telling you in a presumably royalty-free font that the release nanosecond of GTA 6 is X hours, Y minutes, Z seconds away. Gaze upon it. Reflect on what all this means as this, our prehistory, finally comes to its end.

It actually took me a little while to find on account of not knowing what a Legion Square is. I got hit by multiple cars, summoned a tornado, and discovered my wife has a minimap marker now.

Anyway, I got there eventually. It's actually kind of low-effort, to be honest. I was expecting something big but it looks like a recoloured mission mark that someone uploaded a markdown file to. Oh well. Hopefully that doesn't forebode anything.

On a call with investors today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick pushed back on the idea that PC players have a different relationship with the Grand Theft Auto series than console players.

"Your PC players seem to engage with GTA a bit differently than console," said Oppenheimer & Co analyst Martin Yang during a Q&A session. "There are roleplay options. Over time, do you think you want to close the player experience gap between console and PC, or do you view the two platforms as more independent because of their respective technical capabilities?"

Zelnick responded with acknowledgement that series like Civilization started on PC and expanded onto consoles, but said that "generally speaking, the experiences on console and PC tend to be roughly the same" and that, in general, "the capabilities of the PC platform today aren't different materially from console capabilities."

The vanilla GTA Online experience may be roughly equivalent for console and PC players, but the console versions don't have the mods that have helped keep GTA 5 relevant for 13 years. Take-Two of course knows that: It acquired the FiveM GTA 5 multiplayer mod behind so many RP servers.

Answering a related question about console jailbreaking, modding, and monetization opportunities, Zelnick said later that "the FiveM business is a profitable business," but then turned back to one of his stock lines.

"The mission of this company is to create the best entertainment on earth and bring it to consumers around the world," said the Take-Two CEO. "If we do that right, the monetization takes care of itself."

Take-Two has consistently declined to reveal anything about its plans for GTA 6 on PC or the future of GTA Online, and I didn't have high hopes that it would change tack with the console launch just over a week away, but props to the savvy investment analysts who asked about the topics anyway.

As I think the questioner from Oppenheimer was getting at, it's sensible to wonder whether the custom servers and roleplaying features made popular by GTA 5 modders and streamers on PC will come stock in the next GTA Online iteration, including on consoles. Zelnick didn't sound particularly enthused about modding in his responses today—he said that Take-Two "isn't religious on the topic"—but I'm not reading much into it.

For now, Grand Theft Auto 6 is launching on November 19 as a singleplayer-only console game, with no PC release date announced, and no known plans to launch a new version of GTA Online set in Vice City and its surroundings, though we expect both of those things to happen eventually.

GTA publisher Take-Two projects net bookings (total completed sales, essentially) of $3.35 to $3.5 billion for its current Q3 2027 financial quarter, "driven by the groundbreaking release of Grand Theft Auto 6" in a little over a week.

"The launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 is ten days away and, with pre-orders continuing to reach unprecedented levels, we expect to deliver an historic year for our company," said Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.

The publisher has previously said that it doesn't want to reveal the total number of GTA 6 preorders because "the raw numbers could potentially be misleading," given that it's never seen numbers like these before.

The $3.35 to $3.5 billion net bookings expectation for the GTA 6 launch period is actually slightly below analyst expectations of $3.51 billion, as compiled by LSEG Data & Analytics (via Reuters).

Take-Two's net bookings for its previous financial quarter, Q2 2027, came in below expectations at $1.60 billion, and 18% drop year-over-year. NBA 2K7 was one of the culprits there.

"NBA 2K27 had a successful launch and delivered the second highest Net Bookings performance in the history of the series, but it was below our forecast for the period," said the company.

Zelnick told Bloomberg that he thinks anticipation for GTA 6 contributed to NBA 2K27's lower than expected performance.

“If your lunch is going to be eaten, I’d rather be the one eating it,” he said.

Take-Two expects net bookings of $8 to $8.2 billion for its full 2027 fiscal year.

Grand Theft Auto 6 finally arrives on November 19, but not for us, no—the big day is only for gamers on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. We're not being completely excluded, though: We can't have GTA 6 in November, but we can take advantage of pre-release discounts on a bunch of older GTA games—deals that, ironically, don't appear to be available on consoles.

As noted by GamesRadar, there are four GTA games available in two releases: Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas bundled up in the GTA Trilogy for $19.79/£19.79/€19.79—67% off the regular price—and Grand Theft Auto 4: Complete Edition, which includes The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony expansions, for $6/£5.09/€6, a 70% discount.

Those aren't the deepest discounts ever seen, but Grand Theft Auto games typically don't venture into the 90% off territory we all enjoy so much—and according to Isthereanydeal.com, this is as low as the GTA Trilogy has ever gone, and close to the mark for GTA 4.

You may recall that the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition was a mess when it launched in 2021, but it seems to have turned that frown upside-down since then: On Steam, where the trilogy arrived in 2023, Vice City and San Andreas both hold "very positive" ratings. GTA 3 is stuck at a "mixed" rating, which is unfortunate: Glancing at user reviews, it sounds like the game still isn't in perfect shape, but it's also suffering from the fact that it's 25 years old, and was the first 3D game in the series—some jank and roughness was there right from the start.

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Complete Edition, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from those shortcomings. It's getting pretty long in the tooth too—it came out in 2008—but represents a shift in design and tone that led the series into what it is today. If you're looking for just one older GTA game to horse around with, this is the one, especially given that it's less than half the cost of the trilogy.

As mentioned, these sale prices are currently only being offered on Steam: There's currently no sign of any of them on either the Xbox or PlayStation stores (Fun fact: there actually is no digital version of GTA 4 on the PS Store because Sony didn't start selling full-priced games online until well after 2008). Maybe it's just coincidence, but they do appear to be intentional pre-GTA 6 sales: The discounts are on until November 19, when Grand Theft Auto 6 launches—except on PC.

Am I cheating? I might be cheating. I did not actually install a new mod for today's iteration of Los Santos Customs. Like I mentioned yesterday, updating my Script Hook thing seems to have breathed life into a host of old mods I'd installed, but which did not work. Now they work, and here we are.

I'm definitely not cheating on my wife though. I have a wife now, by the way, and all I had to do to get her was teleport her to the roof of a skyscraper and gift her 22 sports cars. No more lonely nights for me, and it's all thanks to Dating Simulator (Public Beta), a mod we probably shouldn't look too deep into in case it gets weird.

Dating Simulator—which refers to itself as Anoxic Dating in the in-game menus—brings the experience of real-life dating into GTA 5. You approach women on the street, ask them how they are 40 times, and then they give you their number. This makes you "Friends" according to the mod's hierarchy of romance, unlocking new, vaguely more intimate dialogue. Discuss the weather with your muse 50 times, then tell her you miss her 60 times and, brother, you're well on the way to wife town.

You can't go through this process with men because it would, obviously, be weird to say "Tell me about your interests" to a man 37 times in a row.

Anyway, I'm basically the most charming man on Earth, but my attempts to corral a woman into marriage were hampered somewhat by my tendency to teleport to random spots on the map every 50 seconds. Fortunately, Anoxic Dating lets you teleport your girlfriends to wherever you are. "How are you?" I'd ask several hundred times, then teleport, then summon my new friend, and say "Crazy weather we're having, huh?" another hundred times. In this way I made her fall for me.

It culminated on the roof of a skyscraper. There I was, there we were, and in line with tradition I kept saying "Will you marry me?" over and over again. She didn't bite, though, and my teleport timer was ticking down. I did what any man would do: immediately bought her 22 sports cars at $45,000 each. I forget her name, but she is now my wife. We are very happy.

Remember when Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed, not once but twice? It's hard to forget: its first release date was treated as a day of mourning by some particularly upset fans. Despite all the outcries from fans, Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick has repeatedly explained that he doesn't regret the decision.

Talking to WSJ the interviewer asks Zelnick what his immediate emotion was after hearing from the team that GTA 6 needed to be delayed: "I don't always feel calm but I tend to come across as calm … The timing of the call was not great for an array of reasons. We had just had a board retreat 10 days earlier so I wasn't thrilled about the timing. That said, this is a balancing act with all creative executives and it's not just time, it could be resources."

"These are very difficult decisions to make," Zelnick continues. "If, on the other hand, if as a refresher course, your mission is to make the best entertainment on earth and part of your three part strategy is to be the most creative, sometimes you have to make these expensive and inconvenient decisions in service of that mission goal.

The delay was essential, Zelnick says, to stay true to Take-Two's mission "to make the best entertainment on earth."

"What happens when people take the other approach," Zelnick asks. "The other approach being we're slavishly devoted to a schedule and we're just going to ship despite what is going on. I'm not going to throw any competitors under the bus, but if you know anything about the videogame business in the past few years there was a very high profile release that fell into this category. They shipped and they had to pull the title after shipping because it didn't work."

I don't think there's much doubt about what game Zelnick is referencing here, but just in case anyone is wondering, my bet would be on Concord—yeah, it's probably Concord. And for good reason: it didn't have a shred of the anticipation that GTA 6 has but was still bankrolled by a major studio and essentially burnt hundreds of millions of dollars—a cautionary tale if ever I heard one.

Today's article is about ParkourV, but it is also about the vast graveyard of mods I have hitherto infected Grand Theft Auto 5 with and which then did not work. Did you know I at some point tried to install some sort of dating mod? I'd forgotten, but then there it was, asking me precisely how I would like to rizz up a babe as I initiated a frontflip from the roof of an 80-storey building.

Why? Because to make ParkourV work, I had to update my installation of ScriptHookVDotNet, one of those fundamental building blocks of modding on GTA, a bit like the Skyrim Script Extender for Skyrim. So now we live in a world in which I am constantly hitting keys and accidentally reanimating the corpses of mods I had installed and written off months ago. That's the world we have now and we're just gonna keep living in it.

Anyway. Parkour. The thing is, you see, GTA 5 is not really designed for parkour. Franklin, Trevor and Mike don't have the points of articulation for it. Attempting to do flips, then, just sort of rotates your entire body below the diaphragm while your head and chest area remain bolt upright, rigid in such a way that you could feasibly fly a flag from your own thorax.

Which looks odd. Nevertheless, it is pretty fun to scoot and roll your way through Los Santos. At one point, I attempted a double frontflip in the middle of a part of the map that had been deleted for some reason. It didn't quite work out, and I ended up colliding with and possibly killing a man in a fursuit.

My technique requires work.

As many readers are no doubt keenly aware, we are—as of today—two weeks out from the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6. To celebrate its impending conquest of the collective attention economy, Rockstar has released a launch gallery of new GTA 6 screenshots showcasing the breadth and color of simulated life in Vice City.

Totaling 39 new screenshots, the launch gallery has a bit of everything: It's got night life, it's got wildlife, and—most importantly—it's got plenty of protagonists Jason and Lucia holding guns and making their serious 'I am involved in violent crime' faces. You gotta have those.

Of that bunch, I'm particularly interested in the screenshot of a gun-toting, tactical-geared Jason seemingly having stepped off a military aircraft and into a firefight, because there appears to be a dog in the background equipped with its own combat gear. Could Jason and Lucia get access to their very own D-Dog? At this point, we can only guess.

Vice City being Vice City, the launch gallery features plenty of partying, showing off dance clubs, dockside dive bars, heavy drinkers, and general debaucherists of all ages. Including your Margaritaville types.

Rockstar took the opportunity to flaunt the variety of its Florida Man representation, revealing all sorts of colorful individuals worthy of the mythology. In one screenshot, a scarred man with heterochromia has two varieties of dead reptile within arm's length. In another, Jason is menaced by a sort of knife-wielding human mullet. Even the cops are a form of Florida Man: There aren't many places nowadays where you can flaunt that sort of moustache/aviator combo without a hint of irony.

And, I'll note, the new screens show a terrifying degree of pore fidelity—and how there's a wide range of skin care philosophies in Vice City. I'm not naming any names, but some of these guys could stand to try out a facial moisturizer. You'll thank me for it. It's nice.

Also, there's an alligator.

There's plenty more to pick through, from wide-angle shots of police raids and hazy meadow sunsets to high-speed chase stills and scuba diving scenes. All those remaining screenshots are in the gallery below.

Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on console on November 19—but we're still waiting to hear about PC. And we're being very patient and brave about it, too.

We've seen more of Grand Theft Auto 6 than we were meant to at this stage. All we were meant to have was a Netflix special, some sparse previews, and a very late launch trailer. But thanks to a certain leaker, some players have been able to see way more than we ever imagined.

This was both good for those who wanted to see more of the game before forking over $100 for its ultimate edition, and bad for the players who wanted an unsullied first look at GTA 6. The leaks gradually escalated, with the party responsible even threatening to leak the entire build and declaring they'd activate a dead man's switch if Take-Two pursued legal action against them.

"Because of the file sizes and the complexity, piracy is less of an issue in interactive entertainment, but it's not been a non-issue," Zelnick says. "And in the event where it turns into an issue we address it in the same way every other business does, which is with legal work and then with technical work, and we'll have to do both." And it's done exactly that. Despite the threats, Take-Two subpoenaed Discord for more user information concerning the leaks, which has since been granted by a court.

"I think it's fair to say that piracy is going to be an issue in our business going forward—we're just going to have to be vigilant about it," Zelnick adds. "Now, it's a little more complex because for all of our games you have to be connected with our servers to have a good experience. So with piracy are you really going to set up competitive servers? Is it really going to be a good experience? It won't be a great experience. But it's not nothing."

We are back. After a long sojourn to the centre of the self, I return—having completed a journey of discovery where I reflected on what I really wanted from modding GTA 5: my true desires, true capabilities, and where I want to take this whole thing as we walk, together, into the future. I speak to you now of the wisdom I have gained from my vagabond travels, behold:

I've put roving packs of hostile cougars in the game now.

The mod to put loads of cougars in Grand Theft Auto 5 is called Cougars, which is easy to remember, and it boasts "seven special cougar types" and four difficulties. Cougar time is initiated with a tap of the delete key, at which point you may choose either Catnap, Furmidable, Feral, or Catastrophe mode, which I am led to believe affects the volume of the cat hordes dispatched against you and the potency of their armaments.

Naturally, I opted for Catastrophe, kicking off a sort of pseudo-game-show opening where Franklin, Trevor, Michael, and Franklin's celebrity bodyguard were all fleeing angry litters of cats. Then we were off, with me—as Franklin—desperately dodging leaping cougars, some of them armed with heavy machine guns, some wearing body armour, some with traffic cones for reasons known only to God. Then I teleported, and the cougars followed me.

This process continued for a few minutes before I realised that, most likely, I was not going to reach my goal of a private jet waiting on the runway at Los Santos International. I performed a rare purposeful teleport to bring myself home, at which point about 56 quintillion cougars attempted to kill me. I solved this problem with an explosive micro-SMG.

When I boarded the plane, I was told I had won, and a man with a cougar for a head and a parade of dancing regular cougars behind him all congratulated me. I teleported away in the middle of their performance. It is good to be back.

Grand Theft Auto's radio stations have long stood as an integral part of the series' whole vibe—either offering time capsules of the times each game was set in (Vice City), or offering a realistic blend of classic and modernity a la Grand Theft Auto 5's excellent music curation.

I've been just a tad giddy to discover what awaits me in Grand Theft Auto 6's car stereos when the game launches on November 19, which has me surprised that Rockstar teasing six of its upcoming stations earlier this month completely flew under my radar.

Well, now I've had a gander and listened to all 12 minutes of its DJs bantering and a peppering of bangers between. And I gotta say, I'm already jazzed to speed down Leonida's highways with some of these stations at full volume.

Rockstar's licensed music curation rarely misses, and that very much seems to be the continuing trend with Grand Theft Auto 6. While we don't know just how many radio stations there are in total yet—this is the first game where we'll be able to tune in to both terrestrial music stations and podcasts, it being 2026 and all—but the six that were teased were the exact kind of flavours I've come to expect from the series.

There's Latin station Cocoteo FM, classic country Back Country Radio, African channel AfroBANK FM, all-out metal hub The Chamber 106.6, pop banger central Flash FM, and hip-hop destination Dirty South Classics. I'm already 100% here for The Chamber's setlist, being an elder emo and all, with bands like Black Sabbath, Pantera, and Slayer making their way onto Leonida's airwaves. But I'm also jazzed to see newer blood on the scene, like Bad Bunny's appearance on Cocoteo.

My biggest interest was in Flash FM, though. Non-Stop Pop has become such an iconic radio station for me, thanks to some excellent song choices and Cara Delevigne's delightfully deadpan delivery. It doesn't seem like I'm going to be disappointed, though—Alex Consani takes up the mantle as model-turned-radio-host alongside the excellent artist Robyn (of Bulletproof fame), and hearing one of my favourite songs in MGMT's Electric Feel is all the confidence I need in Rockstar's keen ear.

While the previews do show criminally little interactions between the hosts (it seems like Grand Theft Auto 6 is going for duos across all its stations, presumably for some easy back-and-forth banter), I'm sure there'll still be satire in droves to come.

Here's each radio station currently teased, along with each song present in the preview. You can check out a brief description of each station along with the audio previews over on Rockstar's website:

Back Country Radio

• The Conversation - Hank Williams, Jr. & Waylon Jennings
• Need a Little TIme off for Bad Behaviour - David Alle Coe
• Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind) - Loretta Lynn

Cocoteo FM

• EoO - Bad Bunny
• Si Es Trucho Es Trucho (Remix) - Axel Rulay ft. Farruko & El Alfa
• Canalla - Romeo Santos & El Chaval de la Bachata

AfroBANK FM

• Joha - Asake
• Gye Wani - Pat Thomas ft. Ebo Taylor
• Shay'sana - DJ Lag & Robot Boii ft. Kamo Mphela

The Chamber 106.6

• I - Black Sabbath
• I'm Broken - Pantera
• Raining Blood - Slayer

Flash FM

• Good Ones - Charli xcx
• Electric Feel - MGMT
• Midnight Sun (Girls Trip) - Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress

Dirty South Classics

• Like a Pimp - David Banner ft. Lil' Flip
• Who Dat - JT Money ft. Solé
• Born N Raised - DJ Khaled ft Trick Daddy, Rick Ross & Pitbull

Edge magazine unleashed a whopper of a 16-page feature all about Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week. After poring over every paragraph multiple times, one thing really stuck out to me: It feels like Rockstar is pushing for a more realistic, grounded experience.

Those two words might sound like an absolute nightmare to some GTA aficionados. It's not like the series has never known how to be serious or gritty—see Grand Theft Auto 4—but it's always facilitated chaos with relative ease. Outlandish weapons, an easily gamed wanted system, NPCs that feel more like props to be mowed down than anything with a personality. If I wanted to hop in and wreak a little criminal havoc for a while, I wouldn't find much hardship in wriggling out of trouble as soon as I was bored.

But it sounds like creating that sort of pandaemonium in GTA 6 is no longer as free as it once was. Police will remember what you looked like, if you were working alone or alongside an accomplice, and any weapon you were carrying. It'll use that information to fight back against the anarchy you orchestrate. It's not just police presence, either. Edge describes chaos as a third participant—no longer just your own, but the way the world reacts to your behaviour: would-be vigilante NPCs stepping in, carjackings going wrong thanks to modern tracking technology.

And you know what? I'm completely here for it. Sure, we're perhaps losing a little bit of that all-out, sky-high criminal power fantasy. I'm probably not going to be able to pull a rocket launcher out of my invisible butt arsenal anymore—Edge notes that larger weaponry instead gets stored inside your car—and I wonder if the world is going to let me lob a hundred sticky bombs at a plane without consequence anymore. But when it's all in the name of a more detailed, more involved-feeling world? I honestly believe that a little bit of grounding is going to make it feel all the more satisfying.

Puzzling out how to gradually return to the shadows is that little extra bit of flavour I've been craving from the series. Even if it is something as simple as a wardrobe change, the modern-day equivalent of going and getting your car spray-painted mid-chase. But co-head Phil Hooker also describes things like jumping on a bus out of sight of any CCTV or witnesses—if police didn't see you get on the bus, there's no way of figuring out where you ended up once you're safely distanced from the scene (or scenes) of the crime.

And ultimately, I don't feel like a more detailed, realistic reaction to my crime sprees dulls their buzz. I don't think Rockstar is trying to stop people from playing the game the way they always have, but instead inviting more ways to let the chaos ripple out and a greater incentive to work strategically on reeling things back in. And while it might feel a little different initially—at least, I should hope it will with 13 years of technological advancement behind Rockstar since GTA 5—I'm confident that the level of depth these sorts of tweaks afford will have even the most hardcore pedestrian-mowers in our midst converted before long.

I may rob casinos, steal cars, and occasionally drive on the sidewalk, but I'm not a monster, and I don't want the civilians in Grand Theft Auto 6 to think I am. Well thanks to the souped-up morality system there will be a bit of space for some redemption.

Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development went into greater detail about what GTA 6's "Criminal Profile" involves during an interview for Edge magazine and how players will have some authority about how the world will react to them.

The Criminal Profile will track your actions as Lucia and Jason on a scale from "Professional" to "Irredeemable", represented by angel and devil icons. It's not necessarily encouraging you all to be saints who disengage with any form of violence and follow road traffic laws to a tee, but you have to be mindful of how much violence you doll out.

Fights don't need to always end in death, a professional criminal may incapacitate their opponent instead of putting a bullet between their eyes or perhaps try to get information or whatever they want from them via less violent means, at least at first. You may try to intimidate or perhaps bribe your way to the best ending. Rockstar has confirmed that your Criminal Profile will affect how the story pans out and so it's certainly something to keep an eye on, if you're gunning for a specific storyline that is.

We've already learned a bit about the Criminal Profile before thanks to an IGN preview in which Nelson also explained how the decision to include such a responsive system stemmed from the fact that the devs didn't want player characters to become too powerful.

"There isn't a right or wrong way to play this game, but consistent actions may have an impact in terms of how the world reacts to you and how the narrative plays out," Nelson says. He also explained how small acts of kindness can redeem you. So, if you see some litter lying around, put it in the bin and if you have a free moment perhaps go to the local park and feed the birds.

Yes, Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series where you drive fast cars and occasionally mow down the odd pedestrian here and there. I like that. It's nice. I am looking forward to also doing that in Grand Theft Auto 6. But the thing I'm really excited to do? Hop on a bus, baby.

Out of all 16(!!) pages from Edge magazine's newest megafeature on Rockstar's upcoming meteor, a teeny-tiny paragraph about Leonida's public transportation system is the one that's got me feeling all giddy. Similarly to Red Dead Redemption 2, the game will feature a fully functioning train system, as well as a bunch of bus routes to help you get around Leonida the old-fashioned way.

And, according to head of development Phil Hooker, they're systems that he has extensively tested to ensure their reliability. "I'm obsessed with making sure they always turn up," he told Edge. "So, anywhere in the middle of playing, I'll just go: right, we're going to get the bus to where we're going. I've memorised all of the routes."

I kind of love it, I can't lie. It really feels like Rockstar is paring down the criminal power fantasy a tiny bit and offering more grounded, realistic ways to exist in its world. Which might make some hardcore pedestrian-mowers a little furrow-browed, but it seems as though the developer is trying to create various levels at which people can engage with the chaos and zaniness the series has typically offered.

As much as I'm also a member of the crime spree brigade, something like a public transportation system is one of those details that's going to make Leonida feel alive in a way we've not really seen from the series before. It feels fitting for a story like Jason and Lucia's, too—it seems like they don't quite want the all-out criminal fame of previous protagonists, and allowing them to engage with more practical methods of getting around feels like the perfect way to play into that.

It's not just a cutesy way to roleplay an everyday commuter, either. Hooker also highlights making use of the buses and trains as a way to evade the watchful gaze of the police. "If they don't see you get on, and then you get out of the 'wanted' area, why would they search the bus unless they see you get onto it?"

More than anything, Edge's feature now has me desperate to go buy a beer, a pack of smokes, and jump onto a bus to watch the world go by. Though the only place I think Hooker is wrong is that he's been rigorously ensuring everything turns up on time—I dunno how things work in Florida, but the true realistic experience would be to have no buses turn up for ages until two or three arrive bumper-to-bumper. That's the true public transportation experience, after all.

Anyone tells you that love cannot be measured. That it's a feeling deeper than any other emotion which has bound humanity together since the dawn of time and therefore cannot be quantified is lying to you. You absolutely can measure it, and I'd go as far as saying you can even rank people on it, which is exactly what Grand Theft Auto 6 is setting out to do.

The recent mega piece by Edge has revealed that GTA 6 players will be able to measure Jason and Lucia's closeness in a four-point scale which we're coining as the boyfriend-o-meter.

It's confirmed that you can switch between characters in GTA 6 so you'll likely have to show up for your other half no matter who you're playing as. Activities like taking long romantic walks on the beach, working out at the gym together, and driving around so your other half can doomscroll will all work towards boosting your score.

The relationship between Lucia and Jason certainly seems to be more involved than we first thought, but that's not to say it will take centre stage or be overly important. Your actions will have narrative consequences but only within a narrow scope of possibilities.

But that probably still won't help to calm the growing discourse of people who seem to think that playing GTA 6 is essentially cheating on your partner. I personally think that this is just a psyop propagated by people who don't like having fun, and that no real sensible person would see roleplaying a healthy relationship in a videogame as cheating on your significant other. Especially as you play as both characters; it's essentially just playing make-believe with a couple of dolls, but I digress.

Who knows, though? Weirder things have been known to happen on the internet, so maybe there is an army of people angry at the notion of their significant other getting one videogame character to kiss another one.

I will, however, be relationshipping to the max. This is a competition which I plan to win and in the process of doing so show all of Leonida just how capable and fearsome my skills are at cultivating a healthy and strong relationship.

I don't mean to be contrarian (which is rare for me), but I've been generally unfazed by the hype for Grand Theft Auto 6. It's not that I don't think it'll be good—I'm actually damn near certain it will—it's just that none of what Rockstar has focused on so far in its marketing speaks to me all that much.

Anyway, throw those equanimous sentiments out the window, because an anecdote from Edge magazine's new mondo-feature on GTA 6 has convinced me this game is actually an immersive sim, and now I'm bouncing off the walls in anticipation. Chatting about his experience actually playing the game, Rockstar head of development Phil Hooker told a story about the time he deployed a bit of unorthodox crowd control to prepare a store for a heist.

"Recently I was robbing a store that was full of people," said Hooker. "I wanted to get rid of them, because they'd be witnesses who would cause me trouble." What did he do? Well, in GTAs of yore, your options would have been pretty limited, but GTA 6's dovetailing systems gave our man an opportunity. "I basically started picking fights with them, provoking them and then immediately defusing it.

"I didn't actually get them into a fight—I'd just go: 'Ah, sorry, leave it'. Then they would leave the store, so that would clear them out and I could rob it more cleanly." It's one of the things Hooker says he, and Rockstar generally, focuses on in testing: "meeting new NPCs, for example, trying different ways in which to interact with them, trying to find ways to combine the features in ways we maybe haven't thought about."

Forgive me, but is that not the most immersive sim stuff you've ever heard? A sandbox crammed with systems that can collide—or be manipulated—in ways the developers themselves never even expected, to the delight and satisfaction of a creative player? I say it is, and it's quite honestly made me more excited for Rockstar's quadrillion-dollar baby than any glossy trailer. Put it in my hands, please, and then let me use those hands to pick up a crate that turns translucent when I do it.

Rumor has it that GTA 6 will come to PC relatively quickly after the console launch, though Rockstar typically puts at least seven months between console and PC launches.

Grand Theft Auto 6's NPCs are so incredibly complicated, it briefly sent the studio into a bit of a "horrifying" spin, requiring an entire team of writers and producers to be assembled just to handle the workload. This has since been doubly confirmed by the studio in a recent mega-preview from our friends at Edge:

"This same philosophy governs the streets," the preview reads, "Rather than relying chiefly on procedural systems to assemble interchangeable crowds, Rockstar established an entire Los Angeles-based team of writers, directors and producers devoted to making Leonida's NPCs more individually realised."

According to the feature, that meant creating an absurd number of animations: "The studio art-directed every [NPC], creating around 600,000 animations."

What's more, "these pedestrians are assigned personality traits that help determine how they respond: temperament, aggression, where they are, what they have seen, and how the player has behaved towards them. Different districts have their own demographic and professional textures."

As for what a "professional texture" actually is, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson goes into more detail: "Who's going to be aggressive? How many people are going to go for a weapon? How many are going to test me?" Nelson says, repeating the same self affirmations I make daily in the mirror.

The preview continues: "The old GTA pedestrian, a kind of moving prop waiting to panic when the player points a gun, has here splintered into a kaleidoscopic range of possible reactions. Back on the sidewalk, that abstraction suddenly becomes practical. The man with the dog has decided that Jason's stare constitutes a test.

"He squares up, then unclips the leash from the animal's collar. Nelson turns and runs. The dog gives chase. A flock of pigeons bursts into the air. Finally, the animal loses interest and trots back to its owner. Jason slows to a walk, selects a pack of cigarettes from his inventory, lights one, takes a drag, and continues down the street."

Really, the way the preview puts it, GTA 6 seems so thoroughly complicated you could legitimately just sit there and people-watch for a bit: "On the opposite side of the road, Nelson spots an arrest taking place. A suspect is being cuffed by two police officers, who have left their vehicles unattended. He sneaks up to one, clicks the boot open, pulls out a shotgun and slings it onto his back, before walking on, leaving a puff of cigarette smoke curling in the air. We have been watching for three minutes."

Is this sort of immersive sim, top-end simulation particularly necessary in a videogame that, in its purest form, is about wildly driving vehicles and committing crimes? If you're Rockstar, clearly it is, and I can't say I'm not impressed by the amount of craft reportedly on display here. We'll see how it all holds up when millions of people are playing.

On console, that is—we're still waiting to hear about a GTA 6 PC launch date. Rumor has it that the wait won't be too long, but we're not holding our breath.

You can read Edge's GTA 6 feature story over at GamesRadar.

It is not hyperbole to say that GTA 6 is the most anticipated videogame of all time. That'll happen when one of the most acclaimed game developers of all time takes 13 years to finally put out a new game in one of the most popular series of all time.

That's a hell of a lot of pressure for the army of developers at Rockstar. In a conversation with our friends at Edge for the magazine's big inside look at GTA 6, Rockstar North head of development Aaron Garbut spoke about meeting the series' absurd standards.

"We can't just trot out something that's what people might expect, or that was the easy thing to do," he says. "We've not compromised on the scale, the detail, the interactivity, the story, the open world."

Despite the studio's famously secretive posture, Garbut says the team is very much aware of the galactic expectations, and deployed an illustrative metaphor to communicate how he thinks they've managed to meet them.

"I feel like we've built a pyramid on Everest."

While my mind instantly goes to an eventual GTA 6 mod that'll let me ride a giant pyramid down the biggest mountain in Leonida (will fake Florida have mountains?), I have little reason to doubt Garbut's claims here. Impressions, leaks, and Rockstar's own communications suggest that GTA 6 is doubling down on the systemic details that elevated Red Dead Redemption 2 from 'GTA with horses' to a crime-forward life sim.

That game's missions were Rockstar's familiar brand of organized crime, but the things you spent time doing between them were quite new for a mainstream game: Eating, drinking, grooming yourself, camping, browsing, and making small talk with locals. These actions often had some gameplay ramifications, but it was common to perform because it felt like the human thing to do.

Grand Theft Auto has experimented with these little human exercises for a long time—eating healthy in San Andreas, going on dates in GTA 4—but Rockstar's aims for GTA 6 sound like we'll be making little choices like this constantly. Maybe they'll end up being overboard for some, but I for one can't wait to set out on a mission and realize I need to stop for gas.

There's still no announced PC release date for GTA 6. Rumor has it that it won't be a long wait, but we'll believe it when we see it. Rockstar usually puts at least seven months between console and PC versions, and it took a year-and-a-half for GTA 5 to come to PC.

I knew Grand Theft Auto 6's map was going to be big, but I hadn't expected Rockstar to proclaim that it is, in fact, almost as big as the maps from its last three games combined. An absolute whopper of a feature in the latest Edge magazine revealed a little bit about the sheer scale of Leonida, and hoo-boy, is it a big one.

Vice City and its surrounding areas are said to be almost as big as Grand Theft Auto 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2 combined. Which, considering the size of the latter two, is saying something.

But as we all know, quantity does not necessarily mean quality, and boasts about the size of a videogame world are sometimes followed by empty, unexciting expanses. Rockstar seems keen to express that GTA 6's map is not just sprawling, but also dense.

Co-studio head Aaron Garbut told Edge that Grand Theft Auto 6 contains "an order of magnitude more interiors" than the developer's previous games, for a start. That's something I'm pretty excited about personally, as someone who delights in interior design and absolutely hates running head-first into fake doors like Wile E. Coyote barrelling into painted tunnels.

It's not just interiors that have been given a lot of love, though. "Every back alley is as densely detailed and interesting as the others," Garbut says. "You can go anywhere, any random location, and so many people have thought about that location."

The tepid reception to the scarce stretches of Grand Theft Auto 5's northern areas like Senora Desert informed the creation of Leonida's outer reaches, too, which gives me hope that even Leonida's more barren biomes will have plenty to offer.

Garbut says that even after years of development, there are still areas he's yet to explore. That sense of minute detail within such a vast landmass is the thing that has me most excited to poke around this fictional Florida—from soaking in every tongue-in-cheek parodied brand plastered across billboards, to the pockets of life that'll undoubtedly populate street corners and back alleys. If Leonida is as rich as Garbut describes, then I imagine I'll be spending an awful lot of time making note of every little touch.

As for when we can do that on PC, there's still no official word—only a rumor that the wait won't be long. We're not placing any bets at this point. A seven month gap between console and PC is typical for Rockstar, and GTA 5 took a year-and-a-half to make the jump.

Rockstar employees will hold a vote on union recognition over a two-week span in November that will perfectly bracket the studio's launch of the console version of Grand Theft Auto 6. If the vote carries in favor of the union, the IWGB Rockstar Game Workers Union will become the biggest game industry union in the UK, giving employees a voice on matters including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working arrangements, and generative AI policies.

The terms of the recognition deal have been under negotiation between the union and Rockstar management since July, but unionization efforts have been underway for much longer. The process came under intense scrutiny in October 2025 when the studio fired 31 employees in what the IWGB claimed was "the most brazen act of union busting the games industry has ever seen." Rockstar alleged that the fired employees were leaking GTA 6 information in a public Discord; the matter is now before an employment tribunal in Scotland.

"This November, we have the chance to make gaming history not once but twice. As all our hard work, skill and creativity are experienced by GTA VI players for the first time, our voices will now be heard for the first time too," Rockstar Game Workers Union committee member Shanti Easton-Steel said.

"For me, this vote comes down to ensuring employees at Rockstar get honesty and openness surrounding the decisions that affect them. When management choices are kept hidden, we can't properly address issues like the gender pay gap, the uneven and ever-changing policies on overtime pay, or the concerns many co-workers hold around job security post-release. This is our moment to secure a window onto the decisions that shape our lives, and a seat at the table to improve them. I'm immensely proud of the games Rockstar gives its fans—I want to be equally proud of the voice Rockstar gives its staff."

We're proud to share that in a few weeks' time, Rockstar staff will get to have their own say over union recognition. From pay and pensions to parental leave and overtime, this recognition agreement is a chance for workers to be involved in the decisions that shape their lives.

— @rsgworkersunion.bsky.social (@rsgworkersunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-27T22:22:57.195Z

"For anyone who cares about the games industry or the people who keep it running, this vote is just as historic as the game release. But for workers at Rockstar, it is so much more personal: it is fundamentally a choice about whether you get to have a say in how your day-to-day life is organised," IWGB Union president Alex Marshall added.

The vote to recognize the union will run November 12-26, the week leading up, and then the week after, GTA 6's November 19 launch on consoles. Rockstar hasn't commented on the looming vote, but Rockstar head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe indicated in Bloomberg's recent look at the making of GTA that the studio won't fight it: "We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union."

We are just three weeks out from the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which you can tell because it has cleared the release calendar around it like the Chicxulub crater. Ahead of the big day, our friends at Edge magazine visited Rockstar's Edinburgh development HQ to chat with the studio's leaders and put their eyes on GTA 6 in action. That's right folks, it's officially happening. This thing is officially almost a videogame you can play.

The result? The 16-page cover story coming in Edge #430, on sale October 29. They've really been cooking over there, bringing us a bunch of exclusive new imagery, interviews with Rockstar head honchos, and a special gatefold cover with artwork of Jason and Lucia, about whom I already have very strong feelings.

If you're in the UK, you're in luck, because you can pick up the GTA 6 special edition free, plus 13 issues of Edge at 38% off the price you'd pay at the newsstand if you subscribe at this link.

Outside the UK? Don't fret, because new subs will get a free digital edition of the GTA 6 special issue if you subscribe here.

And wherever you are, the full 16-page feature will drop here for everyone to read for free on October 29, coinciding with the release of the magazine.

It's lavish, lovely, and in-depth—so all very Edge, and if you're one of the approximately 8 billion people who are desperate to know more about the most-anticipated game in Rockstar's history (or, well, just history in general, probably), you're gonna want to feast your eyes on it.

Now this is a marketing campaign I can get behind: It looks very much like Rockstar is teaming up with Florida-based brewery Tripping Animals Brewing to bring a trio of Grand Theft Auto 6-themed beers into the real world. That's right—Pißwasser is finally real.

The discovery was made by Grand Theft Auto site GTAVice.net, which found labels for Pißwasser, Patriot, and No Mames Vice City—a re-branding of Tripping Animals' No Mames Lager—in the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau database.

Sure enough, they're in there, although I had to use Hopgrail to dig up the labels: The No Mames Vice City label was approved on October 9, while the Pißwasser and Patriot labels followed on October 15.

So what's in the cans?

NO MAMES VICE CITY

6% ABV American lager

This looks to be a re-brand of Tripping Animals' No Mames beer, so here's what the brewery's website has to say about it: "Bright gold and effortlessly crisp, No Mames blends flaked corn and traditional malts for a smooth, dry lager with subtle floral hops and a hint of sweetness. Clean, crushable, and brewed for easy drinking, anytime."

Patriot and Pißwasser are not yet on the Tripping Animals site, so for those we will go with what we can pull from the TTB database, which frankly isn't much:

PATRIOT BEER

4.2% ABV American lager

A very American lager, the GTA Fandom Wiki says Patriot Beer is possibly inspired by Sam Adams, although it notes that the color scheme of the label is more akin to PBR. Personally I think it's more likely a prescient take on Real American Beer, which is basically a GTA-style parody beer, except it's real. Real American.

PIßWASSER

4.2% ABV lager

The king of GTA beers, Pißwasser is of course a pilsner, it says so right on the label. Now, your local beer nerd is probably leaning forward in his chair to tell you that pilsner is a type of lager, but my local beer nerd, who is me, says that yes, that is technically correct, but it's important to be specific about these things. Otherwise you get people telling you that Rolling Rock and Warsteiner are basically the same, and next thing you know you're in a fistfight with Bill from your grade 10 geography class and then somebody calls the cops and you end up running through people's back yards and tripping over shit and ripping your pants, and nobody gets any beer. Who needs that kind of chaos?

Anyway, none of these brews are confirmed as actually happening at this point, although given their appearances in the TTB database, not to mention Rockstar's largesse with its rental of basically the entire state of Florida to promote GTA 6, it's all but certainly real. It's also an obvious fit, particularly given the meta-popularity of GTA's in-game beer brands.

The bigger question for me is, how do I get some? Promo beers tend not to be great, but No Mames holds a very respectable 85 rating on Beeradvocate, and Tripping Animals seems quite well regarded overall. And let's not forget the all-important bottom line here: it's beer.

Sadly for me (and anyone else not living in Florida who'd like to score a few cans) Tripping Animals distribution appears quite limited: The brewery's website indicates its beers are only available in and around—you guessed it—Miami. Ah well.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on consoles on November 19. I would expect the GTA beers to show up by then too.

Saint Moses the Black, who converted from a life of crime to one of ascetic anchoritism, once told his brothers that if they had aught to learn they need only sit in their cells: "Your cell will teach you everything." I am following his example. I am trading in my life of crime for one of contemplation. I am returning to my cell.

What I mean is, Los Santos Customs has to briefly go on hiatus but will return in the near future. Anyway, today I was an Uber driver with a gun.

I installed Goober & Goober Eats – Realistic Rideshare & Food Delivery, which introduces the gig economy to the hot streets of Los Santos. The premise is simple: you're an Uber guy now. You can bring up your phone (not the regular phone you use in regular GTA 5, but an entirely new, work phone that the mod summons into being and binds to a different key). Then you mark your labour as commoditisable and off you go.

It's all quite well-ordered. A helpful line on your map guides you to your pickup, then a second takes you to your client. Of course, as we all know, I can only obtain a car by teleporting into the nearest one, which was a minor issue, but for the most part I had no problems picking up my order.

Delivering it was another matter. My destination was in San Andreas' far north, easily a couple minutes' drive away (and that's if you manage to not get shot to death, caught in a gang war, or flattened by a passing flying truck). I teleport every 50 seconds to random places on the map.

I gave it the old college try, though, putting pedal to the metal in an attempt to deliver a burrito at physics-defying speed. It was only when I was teleported into immovability between two pylons in a cable car station that I decided it simply wasn't gonna happen. My paralysis did at least give me time to appreciate my notifications, which told me "The Nihilist Sailors have entered Los Santos". Indeed.

I quickly manually teleported to my destination and dropped off the order. I made like $100 or something. Then, just as quickly, I was whisked to the airport, where a group of furries shot my bodyguard to death.

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if today's mod counted. A peek behind the curtain: sometimes I select a mod to try for this feature and it doesn't work. Just plumb does not function. In those cases, I discard it and find another one. It's hard to write something about nothing.

Today's mod did not work. Mostly. I installed WeedFarm (based on PlantationV), which should, in theory, let you "Grow, harvest, and sell weed in GTA 5 with a full-featured farming system."

It does not do this. The farms? Present. The dealer you sell to? Also there. The various individual particulars of the mod, in general, are all correct. And yet try as I might, I cannot harvest a single paltry bud.

I believe this is due to golf and also a jetpack. You see, the controls from WeedFarm (based on PlantationV) are apparently unalterable. Although it comes with an .ini file—which with other mods will often let you rebind keys—it has no obvious means of changing its controls. Bringing up its uber-menu is bound to F3. Also bound to F3: my street golfing mod and jetpack.

This is an issue, as every time I attempt to bring up WeedFarm (based on PlantationV)'s master menu, I start golfing and the game asks if I want to equip a jetpack. I don't! I want to farm weed! I want to farm weed but I am compelled to golf!

It's an awkward situation. I did try visiting the dealer—perhaps he'd let me sidle into the mod somehow—but no luck there either. At one point, I punched his front door in frustration, at which point I learnt all my melee attacks detonate on impact now, and I don't know why.

World War 2 Canadian air force pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr once wrote, in his poem High Flight:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

He was talking about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, his favourite game and an icon of the PS2 generation of consoles. In San Andreas, tucked away in the Verdant Meadows Airstrip, the player could locate a jetpack, and tumble through the skies of Las Venturas like a glorious errant star. GTA 5? No jetpack. This is why it's an inferior game.

Until now. I have installed Aerowing - Wearable Jet Pack & Weapon System. Or, well, I installed it, tried to launch the game, crashed my PC, rebooted, tried to launch the game, crashed the game, rebooted, then launched the game.

It's a strangely lavish mod, I'll give it that. You don't just tap F and sort of limply ascend, which is mostly how it went in San Andreas. No, you get a whole animation, the camera circles your guy as he does a possibly-copyrighted Iron Man pose and launches himself skywards.

Then off you go, a speedometer in the corner measuring your courage as you glide along, launching one of three weapons: SMG, plasma, and "tube," which I'm pretty sure is just SMG again.

It's a rollocking good time, and it'll be even better once I find a way to proc it that doesn't also proc my street golfing mod. Until then, with silent lifting mind I'll tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.

We won't get to play Grand Theft Auto 6 when it launches for consoles on November 19, but they can't stop us from watching the Grand Theft Auto 6 launch trailer! So, let's do that.

It's definitely a trailer for a GTA game, but this one feels a bit more restrained to me than what we've seen in the past—or maybe more focused is a better way to put it, with a greater emphasis on character and narrative than the chaos of the previous games, or even the previous GTA 6 trailers. There's definitely a cinematic flair to it—makes me feel like I'm settling in for the season-ending two-parter of a Michael Mann series from a decade or so ago.

So what's cooking in our newest trip to Leonida?

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

The musical choice is interesting: Rather than the licensed music of the first two trailers (Tom Petty's Love is a Long Road in trailer one, The Pointer Sisters doing Hot Together in trailer two), this tune is a new track from Justice, an electronic duo who composed the GTA 6 score. If you dig it, here's the full version—it's pretty good!

We still don't have a release date, or even an official announcement, for the PC version of GTA 6, although there's no doubt one is coming—it always happens, sooner or later. A recently floated rumor said it'll be out sometime in early 2027, just a few months after the console debut, but I'm not buying it.

It's a classic move: A villain, or sometimes a hero, inserts himself into a seemingly inescapable situation. Danger everywhere—no way out! But just as the good guys (or bad guys) are about to pounce, he holds up the pin he's pulled from the grenade under his coat, forcing everyone to back off! Escape is at hand!

That seems to be the strategy now adopted by notorious Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, and by "seems to be," I mean they stated it outright. In a message posted to their now-defunct website but preserved by GTA VI News on X, Cyberleek committed to not releasing anything more about GTA 6—including its ending, which at this point remains unknown—as long as Take-Two lets everything slide.

"CL has the ending. It was considered," the message states. "It would punish Take-Two greatly—but ruin the experience for the gamers, who did nothing wrong. Take-Two would show CL no mercy—why should CL show any to them? Still: Take-Two was punished enough.

"The ending stays unpublished. Proof: the latest leek—clips from the final missions, out of context, revealing nothing. The dead man's switch is active—story spoilers only. Left alone, it never fires. Whoever removes CL chooses it."

A dead man's switch, generally speaking, is a switch built to be triggered if its operator is incapacitated. Miles Dyson, for instance, blew up Cyberdyne Systems with an improvised dead man's switch in Terminator 2 (not that it did much good) and Roger Murtaugh did the literal grenade-pin thing in Lethal Weapon while trying to save his daughter from Shadow Company goons. There are variants—in Point Break, for instance, Rosie was ordered to kill Johnny Utah's girlfriend if Bodhi didn't check in by 3, to ensure Johnny's participation in a bank robbery.

My own personal favorite dead man's switch comes from Hawk the Slayer:

That particular variation on the theme notwithstanding, dead man's switches are meant as last-ditch failsafes: If something bad happens to me, something much worse will happen to you.

It makes me wonder if Cyberleek's sudden withdrawal and proposed détente with Take-Two means that they're starting to feel the heat. Take-Two takes this sort of thing seriously as a matter of course, and you can bet it's going to go extra-hardass on anyone who messes with its biggest game ever, which GTA 6 unquestionably is. I have no doubt that life for Cyberleek will become very unpleasant, very quickly, if and when they're ever caught.

The problem Cyberleek faces, of course, is that their leverage—assuming it's real in the first place—has a very short shelf life. In six weeks at most, the GTA 6 ending will be out there, at which point there will be no shot left to shoot.

At best, then, this threat grants Cyberleek an extra month to find a deeper hole to hide in. And even that is wildly optimistic: Take-Two might be operating quietly, but I have no doubt that it's also operating furiously, and that there's not much of a mood to play 'I won't if you won't' games.

Cyberleek also defended their cryptocurrency ask, saying it "was always a donation, never an investment," and denying that a rugpull happened; they also said they wouldn't release the full build of GTA 6, with "full story mode, played to the end," because their memecoin market cap didn't hit $30 million.

Following my experience being abducted by a small yellow taxi, something has become clear to me: I need a means to escape. The trauma of my kidnapping experience cannot be repeated. I have installed Eject for Grand Theft Auto 5, a mod that lets you punch out of vehicles at a moment's notice.

"A simple little fun script that allows you to eject from vehicles and parachute down," reads the mod's description—a claim which is 50% true. You can, indeed, eject from vehicles at the push of a button, but the parachuting down part is more of a screaming plummet. We make do.

The mod's defaults are relatively anaemic. Its "Force" setting sits at a measly 150. 150 what? No idea, but that's a small number, so I immediately increased it to 10,000. I also tried increasing it to 100,000, which seemed to crash the game on launch.

And then, off I went, sailing through the streets of Los Santos in my shiny car in the night (sometimes in the day) and whacking the eject key to hop out. The mod has not quite mastered preservation of momentum, so my attempts to, for instance, leap across an overpass and land safely back in my car, met mostly with failure. And by mostly I mean entirely.

Still, it did let me do this, so I'm calling it a mixed success.

Grand Theft Auto 6, originally slated to be released back in May, was delayed to November—the reason given at the time was "to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve". And while that still very much holds true, the reality of the game's scope and stature was apparently kinda terrifying from a production standpoint.

Speaking with Bloomberg, co-head of development Rob Nelson commented on one reason for the delay—the amount of NPCs that were required to populate Leonida: "The projections they were giving us were horrifying." The solution? A kind of NPC emergency room, an entire studio set up in LA solely designed to handle the workload.

Another development co-head, Phil Hooker, comments: "I think when it became apparent that some areas weren’t going to make it, that’s when we decided to make the shift of date. We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make."

Being perfectly candid, for a moment: This fills me both with a sense of dread and relief. The former is acquired from the same residual existential fear I felt back in May of last year. Namely, the fact that videogames probably aren't meant to look this pretty or be this sprawling—that the industry simply cannot support them, and that GTA 6 is going to be the last of its kind.

The relief comes from the fact that, in an industry culture seemingly determined to figure out how to push creatives out of their seats as quickly as possible with AI? That a bunch of actual writers and producers were brought in to handle the load. There's this perception that background details in video games can be automated because, well, they're background details—they're not important, surely?

But in my humble opinion, those are, in fact, the details you want to get right. The background chatter and worldbuilding of a game is important because it'll lend said game its texture, even if you're just parodying Florida.

GTA 6 will be a better game because, when its developers panicked, Rockstar (which doesn't have the brightest industry track record, let's be clear) didn't cheap out on the massive writing load it'd accidentally saddled itself with, and that's commendable in a vacuum.

Now, is it healthy or normal that an industry giant can be so large it can pop-up an entire studio in LA full of writers just to handle a temporary task? Probably not, and it's certainly not something that's gonna last, particularly not at the industry's current price-point.

Dan Houser is a co-founder of Rockstar Games and so I would never presume to tell him he's wrong about any of the games Rockstar has made—except in this one particular instance, where I feel obligated to step up and say, 'Dan, I'm sorry bud, but you're wrong.'

The game in question is Max Payne 3, on which Houser played a central role, and one he seems rather down on: In an interview with IGN, he said the game was a "failure" because, simply put, he's not Sam Lake, the Remedy creative director who wrote the first two Max Payne games.

As a very linear game, Max Payne 3 "was a little different" from the open world GTA games he was accustomed to, Houser said, but he also really enjoyed the experience. "I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn't have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen.

Alas, he continued, "I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it.

"So I got that completely wrong," Houser said. "I know Sam Lake well, and he's a very good guy and really talented. I thought we'd done a good job of doing another Max Payne game. Some people liked it; lots didn't. So we got it wrong, or I got it wrong. I failed. My bit was not a success.

"The game is beautifully made, and it wasn't as successful as it should have been. So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed his writing."

Max Payne 3 is a really interesting case study because it's very much a Max Payne game—grim and gritty, filled with bullet time, body drops, and snappy commentary about how much life sucks—but it's also a full-on Rockstar game, and thus a very different vibe from the previous two entries in the series. Fans who were expecting more of the same—or insisting on it, really—were bound to be disappointed.

But Max Payne 3 itself is nothing short of a brilliant, powerhouse cinematic shooter. It really does feel like "a 12-hour movie," powered by lush cut scenes, a brilliant soundtrack by industrial rock group Health, and great performances across the board, in particular from James McCaffrey in the title role.

With all due respect to Remedy, this is where McCaffrey really hit his stride, digging deep to deliver some truly great lines:

• I wouldn't know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister.
• Look at me, I'm standing in a nightclub, listening to music I can't stand, I'm five thousand miles from home, I'm armed, and I'm drinking. You don't want to listen to advice from me, amigo.
• I had a hole in my second favourite drinking arm, and the only way we were likely to get Fabiana back now was in instalments.

• I'd killed more cops than cholesterol and still no sign of Becker. It wasn't the first time it dawned on me I should probably have gone over the plan in more detail, but it was too late for that now.
• I was a dumb American in a place where dumb Americans are less popular than the clap.
• I'd put a big shit-eating grin on my face and let these assholes take turns trying to kill me. That's my style and it's too late in the day to hope for change.

• We'd half destroyed Sao Paulo's most hallowed place of worship. Looking back it was strange how the cops never showed up. But things had a habit of only making sense to me looking back, long after I'd run out of time to fix them.
• I'd been sitting at the bar for three hours, or about five years, depending on how you looked at things. I tried not to look at things.

It is fair to say that Max Payne 3 wasn't a massive commercial success: In 2012, publisher Take-Two Interactive said sales of the game came in "lower than expected," resulting in a significantly increased net loss for the quarter. But that's hardly the only measure of success, and I think it's notable that Take-Two said the same, at the same time, about Spec Ops: The Line, a game widely heralded, then and now, for its daring, subversive narrative.

Max Payne 3 was a slower burn, but I think the passage of time has given us a far better perspective on what Rockstar actually delivered: As former PC Gamer writer Andy Kelly wrote a full decade ago, "Over the years I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the risks Rockstar took in breaking Remedy’s established, and beloved, mould."

"It’s a radical departure, but it works," the other Andy wrote in his very correct take on Max Payne 3. "It’s always interesting to see a familiar character thrust into an unfamiliar situation, and Max is hilariously out of place in Brazil. As if being a white American in a favela didn’t draw enough unwanted attention, he makes his life even more difficult by wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt imaginable. He was comfortable in New York, but here he’s an outsider, and the game plays up to it brilliantly."

And so, Dan, with all due respect, I have to say, 'I'm sorry bud, but you're wrong.' Max Payne 3 may have been divisive in its time, and it may not have been the big hit you were hoping for, but I sure wouldn't call it a failure. I'd say Rockstar, and you, absolutely nailed it.

A GamesBeat report claims that Grand Theft Auto 6—which still hasn't been announced for PC—will launch for PC sometime within the first three months of 2027. If correct, that means the game will drop, at most, just four months after its initial release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

GamesBeat cites "four industry sources familiar with the studio's plans" in its report, all of whom requested anonymity. Rockstar has not yet commented on the claim.

It's a surprising claim. Earlier this year, we predicted that GTA 6 won't likely appear on PC before November 2027, mainly because that's just how Rockstar rolls. We always have to wait.

The Unfortunate Timeline

• Grand Theft Auto 3: 7 months between console and PC release
• Vice City: 7 months
• San Andreas: 8 months
• Bully: 2 years
• GTA 4: 7 months
• Red Dead Redemption: 14 years, 5 months
• GTA 5: 1 year, 6 months
• RDR2: 1 year

Compared to that, a four month break between the console and PC releases, and possibly less, seems downright snappy, especially given how the gaps between GTA games themselves have grown over the decades.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Not only would a Q1 release of GTA 6 on PC be an unusually brief break, it also puts the game in the midst of the post-holiday hangover, when we're all doing our best to nurse our bruised and battered bank balances back to health.

And that, I think, would feel especially egregious in the immediate aftermath of this year's holiday season, which for gamers will be driven by the release of GTA 6 on consoles. Rockstar loves the double dip, but punching the button again so soon after the console release would surely be viewed dimly by a not-insignificant number of people who would prefer the flexibility and power of the PC, but really don't want to wait for it.

Of course, if Rockstar or Take-Two confirms the GTA 6 PC release date really is that close—Take-Two's next quarterly financial report takes place on November 9, which might be a time for such a thing—some no doubt would wait for it, cannibalizing launch sales to some extent.

There's no shortage of people on social media saying they will indeed wait to buy GTA 6 if the PC version is indeed coming that quickly. That feeling may be even more widespread than it appears, given how much GTA 6 costs: At $100 for the premium edition and all the exclusive content it contains, you can understand why people might be more reticent about buying it multiple times than they were for earlier games in the series.

How about you?

Anything's possible, of course, and I would never presume to have a better understanding of these things than Strauss Zelnick and the rest of the GTA brain trust. But I also wouldn't bet on it—and for now I'm definitely taking all of this with a grain of salt. I've also reached out to Rockstar to ask about it, and will update if anyone answers.

What's the greatest moment in a videogame? Finding the truth of what happened at Red Mountain in Morrowind? Catching every pokémon in Pokémon? Something inscrutable in Final Fantasy 14?

All excellent answers. All wrong. The greatest moment in videogames is repeatedly dropping shipping crates on Quiet's head in Metal Gear Solid 5 until she decides to become your comrade for life.

Naturally, I had to bring this experience to Grand Theft Auto 5, and I did it using Just Cause 3 Rebel Drops [.NET], which allows you to summon Tardis-like containers filled with goodies at any location in Los Santos. Tap the L key, choose from your list of summonables. Bish bash bosh, done.

Of course, what you can summon is guns (I have them all) and vehicles (they speed off over the horizon as soon as they appear), so mostly what I have been using the technology for is to attempt to drop crates on my bodyguard. It's tougher than it might sound: the crates land haphazardly, without much rhyme or reason, and my bodyguard is a wily fella—quick on his feet.

Still, it is great fun to spawn a jumbo jet in the middle of an intersection and watch the world have to try to encompass this new and undesired aspect of its reality. Even the jet isn't into it; as soon as it appears, its wheels fly off like a buck shedding its antlers. It's as if the game knows reality has departed from an acceptable baseline and it's trying, as best it can, to return to it. It fails, but you have to respect the attempt.

Meanwhile, in the background, the furry gang continues to wage war on the vikings.

I have never seen an episode of Rick and Morty in my life. Here is what I know about it: there is a man who is a scientist, a boy, they sometimes play that one Blonde Redhead song, and the whole thing evinces very strong reactions in people—Sichuan sauce and whatnot.

Obviously, my understanding leaves something to be desired. I set out to educate myself. I installed Rick, Two Crows, and Morty for Grand Theft Auto 5. At the tap of a button, all the bounty of the TV show becomes available to you: a boy of adjustable size, guns that are lasers and light rings, a car that is a flying saucer, and poké balls that generate black holes (distinct from the poké balls that are poké balls, which are also installed in here somewhere).

It's all quite fun. Smack F7 and Trevor becomes Rick (or perhaps Morty), bedecked in a labcoat and a filthy t-shirt. The ambient chaos of Los Santos proceeds around him: natural disasters, vanished exterior cells, flying cars.

The world has found a rhythm now, I think; it proceeds without me. As I toss black hole poké balls at people and shoot them with lasers, a notification pops up from some other mod and tells me "The American People have been wiped out." I see.

I cannot for the life of me work out how to actually pilot Morty's (or perhaps Rick's) flying saucer, though. I can just make it rise and fall. Occasionally it rotates in the air. No matter, as I am quickly teleported to a drinking hole in northern, rural San Andreas. I throw a poké ball behind the bar and walk out.

Outside, a tornado is consuming an entire battalion of furries. My bodyguard, irresistibly attracted to the black hole making a mess inside the bar, is stuck to an external wall like iron filings to a hidden magnet. He screams. I know how he feels.

Cyberleek has been uploading footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 since August, most recently a 25-minute video featuring co-protagonist Jason totally nude. Given that GTA 6's November 19 release is just over a month away, on console at least, it seems natural that interest in these kinds of leaks would wane. Cyberleek has found a new way of generating hype: promising to leak a build of the game if their memecoin's marketcap goes up another $26 million or so.

"Here's the deal, nice and clean. CYBERLEEK hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out – full story mode, played to the end, credits and all. Don't believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they'll pick."

The other half of the deal suggests that publisher Take-Two Interactive could prevent this by releasing GTA 6 physically and apologizing, presumably for not releasing it on discs in the first place. Which will never happen, but does fit with Cyberleek's previous history of cosplay Robin Hood consumer rights complaints.

We know that Cyberleek has access to a playable build since one of the previous leaks ended with the word LEEK being machinegunned into a wall to prove the point. But an early build of GTA 6 seems like the worst possible way to play it on PC, though after the Xbox streaming thing turned out to be a bust, maybe there are people who don't want to wait?

Personally I'm looking forward to a slow November where I might actually get a chance to catch up on this year's other releases, like The Blood of Dawnwalker and that Hellraiser game that just came out.

I really don't know how to build up to this one. Grand Theft Auto 5 is Doom now, okay? I put in a mod that imports DOOM2.wad into GTA 5 and now that's what the game is. There are demons. The game is first person. I have a minigun and a BFG. That's the truth of the matter and we're all just going to have to find some way to live with it.

The mod is Doom 2 in GTA 5 Hell On Earth (D2IGTA5HOE), and it does all those things I said. Hit F9 and the game you are playing shifts from GTA 5—usually a third-person open-world acting game—to Doom 2, an FPS from 1994. You need to provide your own .wad—everybody be cool. No one call the cops.

The world remains, mind you. You don't warp to Doom 2's levels. Instead, you roam Los Santos with an arsenal of weapons from id's seminal shooter (gross). You can take on taxis with your super shotgun, fight cops with a plasma cannon. It's two great tastes that taste incomprehensible together. Hit F10 and the game goes into Hell On Earth mode—authentic Doom 2 enemies start manifesting in the street.

One issue, of course, is that F10 is also my button for activating flossing and Superman mode, so I can't play Doom 2 GTA 5 Edition without a full quarter of my screen being taken up by a (still utterly Arabic) flossing UI screen and various Kryptonian powers sometimes activating. One of those is super speed when I sprint, though, which is at least appropriate for Doom Guy.

Anyway, here's a gif of me fighting demons and armed furries at an airport with Doom 2 weapons while a tornado closes in.

Cyberleek, the anonymous someone who's been sharing clips apparently taken from a Grand Theft Auto 6 development build, has returned after a hiatus with a new, 25-minute-long video that's circulating in places like the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit and social media.

The most notable thing about the clip—or most noticeable, at least—is that protagonist Jason spends much of it naked. His genitals are fully modelled, physics and all, which isn't too surprising given we previously saw fully nude NPCs in another of Cyberleek's GTA 6 clips.

It remains unknown whether players will be able to walk around in the buff in the retail game, as Cyberleek presumably has access to developer tools. A floating tank seen partway through the clip makes it apparent that at least some console command shenanigans are at play. It's also notable that NPCs do not react to Jason's nakedness, and that the video shows first-person driving, a feature GTA 6 was previously reported not to include.

IGN did see a naked Jason during a cutscene in an official preview of GTA 6, but "thanks to some carefully positioned camera angles, his modesty remained entirely intact." So we just don't know, although it wouldn't be the first time a GTA game included full frontal male nudity of a prominent character, which occurred in GTA 4's The Lost and Damned DLC.

GTA 6 co-protagonist Lucia also appears topless in the Cyberleek clip, facing away from the camera and wearing a thong. Whether the underwear was the leaker's choice, or if GTA 6 unevenly enforces modesty, is also unknown.

A new era of videogame dong?

Whatever level of nudity GTA 6 ultimately does or doesn't allow—and once it's on PC, you can be sure that modders will make sure nothing is disallowed—it's a bit surreal to see how not-a-big-deal it all is after once experiencing Fox News hosts being scandalized by alien boobies in Mass Effect.

I want to say that things sure have changed since GTA's infamous Hot Coffee 'sex minigame' incident, but have they? We're certainly far from a golden age of people being chill about things; you can't throw a stone on the internet without hitting some new sect shouting about its brand of traditional values (and the dietary supplements that complement it).

And yet it didn't seem like an especially big deal to conservative critics when Baldur's Gate 3 casually gave its characters detailed nude bodies and underwear lore. If it was, I didn't see it—perhaps it's just harder to stand out in today's noise bath of discourse.

Probably more relevant is that games just got more mainstream and have an older audience on average, and so they now have an easier time getting away with all the things Hollywood does.

As Andy observed recently after reaching out to infamous GTA critic Jack Thompson: "...Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it."

Oh, and about Cyberleek: They're back to claiming they've got a "project" underway that you should help fund. I don't recommend that. Take-Two and Rockstar continue to look for the culprit, but we haven't heard any new developments on that recently.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I think we, as a society, as a people, are generally fine with furries at this point. The phenomenon of ragging on furry subculture has been, gladly, consigned to the dustbin of history. It's a 2010 disease from which we have convalesced. Let nothing I write from here on be taken as a slight against them.

That being said, it is very funny to give someone in a fursuit a gun and a military objective.

I have installed, well, two mods actually. The first, preliminary mod is Gang and Turf Mod, which adds a sort of gang war system in the vein of GTA: San Andreas. Different factions will wage war over areas of Los Santos, from the heart of downtown up to the podunk rural hamlets in the north.

Then I installed the main course: Furry Gang for Gang and Turf Mod, which festoons the city streets with murderers in wolf outfits who are here to take their corners with blood and gunpowder. There are other gangs—gangs installed by default with the base mod—but I honestly didn't pay much attention to them. Some of them were in suits? They truly all got steamrolled by the marauding bands of fursuited raiders.

Like an embedded reporter in a war, I followed one band of armed furries into battle. Dodging cars, they dispatched most of their foes pretty quickly, but then a tornado manifested and started whipping them into the sky. At one point, I punched one of them, mostly out of overstimulation. Then I got eaten by the tornado too. Then I teleported somewhere else. Nearby, on a ridge, was a single furry in a purple suit, immobile and gazing, planning some future conquest.

All of these things happened.

It's hard to imagine now, but a little over 20 years ago the gaming world was absolutely scandalized by Hot Coffee, a mod to activate abandoned code in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that enabled CJ to have interactive sex with his girlfriend.

The game was re-rated as "Adults Only" by the ESRB in 2005, forcing it off retail shelves—this was a time when retail shelf space mattered—and it was banned outright in Australia. Even the US Federal Trade Commission got involved, complaining that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive "did not tell consumers that the game discs contained potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game."

22 years later, with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the verge of console release, it all seems rather quaint. From the ESRB's newly posted rating, here's what we've got to look forward to in GTA 6:

• Blood and Gore
• Intense Violence
• Mature Humor
• Nudity
• Strong Language
• Strong Sexual Content
• Use of Drugs and Alcohol

All of which adds up to an M rating—that is, "generally suitable for ages 17 and up." PEGI, the European game rating agency, came down a little harder, rating it 18+ in a since-deleted listing that also noted the presence of "detailed decapitation" and "frequent and prominent" drug use.

How did we get from there to here? Well, we grew up—literally. The Entertainment Software Association said in 2025 that the average gamer in the US is 36 years old and has been playing for 18 years: That's police, politicians, and parents who all came up playing games (including GTA) and view them as no more remarkable than a spicy episode of Miami Vice.

The societal collapse that some alarmists anticipated, meanwhile, failed to materialize—well, it failed to materialize as a result of games, anyway. But a sudden uptick in violent crime and killings, sparked by "murder trainers" like GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo? It never happened. If anything, we've seen the opposite: As gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and the number of gamers has gone up, violent crime has seen a decline over the last two decades.

You could argue, I suppose, that the mainstreaming of Grand Theft Auto represents social desensitization—a loosening of the standards and decorum that made certain kinds of mature content much more taboo. But after years spent bearing witness to the moralizing hand-wringing that gave us the Satanic Panic, the Parents Music Resource Center, the bloody-minded determination to keep the Comics Code Authority alive despite its complete irrelevance, and of course the creation of the ESRB, I'm more inclined to think that what we're really doing is slowly figuring out what actually matters, and acting accordingly.

Plus ça change...

An infamous voice of criticism from this distant generation has not softened his position, however. With GTA now a mass-market entertainment franchise, no more frightening than a typical Marvel movie, I reached out to former attorney Jack Thompson; 20 years ago he was notorious among gamers for his determined, often theatrical efforts to link violent videogames to real-world violence and have them stringently regulated as a result, and I was curious how he felt about Florida's embrace of the GTA marketing machine, and the changed world we live in.

Thompson was such a high-profile presence on the videogame scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s that he was portrayed by Bill Paxton in The Gamechangers, a BBC Two docudrama about his long-running feud with Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser.

Thompson, who lives in Florida, is clearly unhappy with various GTA 6 promotional partnerships being enacted across the state. "If you don't understand that government promotion of commercial interests is fascism then we have very little to talk about," Thompson told me. "Ask the County Sheriff what she thinks about this unholy corporatist alliance."

I had in fact asked the sheriff, and the sheriff's department told me that it is not concerned by "promotional decisions [made] by private businesses or organizations." I relayed this to Thompson, who accused me of drinking the "fascist Kool-Aid," likened me to Joseph Goebbels, and told me to stop bothering him. He elaborated on that, very slightly, in a subsequent email: "The problem is your work proves you are not an honest journalist."

I feel a bit bad about that. I thought that with nearly 20 years of water under the bridge, Thompson may have softened, or at least reached a place where he could reflect soberly on the way the world has changed. That clearly hasn't happened.

Maybe that's understandable, because—and this isn't meant to be triumphal, I'm not spiking the ball, it's simple fact—after a life and career spent warring against it, Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it. And here we are—we're fine. To me, that's a good outcome, but to someone who bet everything on the irresistibly corrosive impact of GTA? The absence of chaos and catastrophe—that everything is fine, at least in the sense that violent videogames didn't herald the end times—might just be a little disappointing.

The diary of my time with Grand Theft Auto 5 so far consists, in the main, of struggles with cars. The perfidious automobile, the horseless carriage, has run rampant in Los Santos for weeks now, causing all manner of chaos as I attempt to live my life and do backflips and what-have-you.

Time to put them in their place. To do so, I have utilised Toy Cars – Make any car tiny, whose nature is right there in the name. The pitch is that you can transform any car you drive into its Micro Machines equivalent, shrinking them down to fit in a child's hand, keeping "your original vehicle visible, sounding, and behaving like itself while using a hidden RC-sized chassis underneath to provide miniature collision, suspension, and road physics."

This is not quite how it goes for me.

As ever, this is not the mod's fault. It seems to work well. After teleporting my way into a car (they are mostly too airborne to hijack normally), I drive around a bit and tap F7—the magic car-shrinking key. This is where it all goes to pot, you see.

The shrinking bit? Works great. My car—a taxi—instantly transmogrifies, becoming a Lilliputian replica of itself. Then it all goes off the rails. Somehow, for reasons that will forever be beyond me, I think the game stops registering the car as having a driver. If it's not a player-character vehicle, it suddenly becomes subject to the laws (or lack of laws) that govern every other car in the game: it careens off like a scared horse, bouncing off walls, ducking under low arches.

It is entirely beyond my control and I cannot get out. If I hit F—the traditional button for exiting a car—a notification pops up that there are no deer nearby. This is saddening news but not immediately relevant to my being taken hostage by a car.

Fortunately, I can return the car back to scale with another tap of the F7 key, but I am somewhat sad. For a moment there, I thought I could live the Borrower life I always dreamt of. Maybe some other time.

We still don't have a PC launch date for Grand Theft Auto 6, or even official confirmation that it's ever going to come our way, even though we all know it is. But for one brief shining moment, fans on PC had hope that maybe they'd be able to backdoor their way into the cool kids club—that despite the absence of a PC version, they might be able to play it on November 19 anyway, without having to shell out for a new game console.

Alas, the word has come down from on high, and that word is: "No."

The ball got rolling when The Verge reported on October 6 that Xbox had secured the exclusive right to deliver GTA 6 via streaming platforms—that is, Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that would presumably make the game playable on PC, as Xbox Cloud Gaming is accessible through any PC rocking Windows 10 version 20H2 or later.

You'd almost certainly have to sign up for Game Pass Ultimate to access it, and you'd need a better internet connection than mine to make it work, but even so: Grand Theft Auto 6, on PC, on launch day. Holy guacamole!

Alas, it is now time to lock eyes with the metaphorical skull in your hand and ponder that dream, that faraway hope, and all that has brought them low—which in this case is Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball, who delivered the bad news on X.

"While the excitement for GTA 6 and Xbox is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting," Ball wrote. "We are looking forward to launching GTA 6 on Xbox November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC."

That's some real infinite jest, alright! Which I think is applicable to the whole situation: I actually buy the argument that it's better to develop a game of this scale within the constraints of consoles and then expand to the greater (and more unpredictable) power of PC later, and I have no doubt that Rockstar and Take-Two also enjoy the tighter constraints on the user end of things too: You're not going to find shenanigans like Joshua Wolens' effort to mod GTA 5 into GTA 6 in the worst way possible on a PlayStation 5, after all.

But I also think PCG's Ted Litchfield hit the nail on the head with his analysis: "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." There really is no dip like the double dip.

Anyway, some of the responses to Ball's message complain that the message is vague or ambiguous, although I'm not sure how: There are questions, sure, most obviously how Xbox will stream GTA 6 without making it accessible to PCs that can normally access streamed Xbox games. It's a fair point, and I suppose if one has an inflated sense of optimism and squints at the statement just right, a faint glimmer of that hope might remain. But to me, 'will not be streaming to PC' seems pretty cut-and-dried: Our long, wintry wait will continue.

A shift in the fabric of reality: I launch Grand Theft Auto 5 and, following the now-customary hitch-and-stutter loading screen that can last anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, Franklin spawns into his familiar void apartment. Within seconds, he begins plummeting, screaming.

All of this is fine and normal.

But something new: Franklin carries a duffel bag with him into the abyss now, and I am unsure as to why. My guess is that it is a byproduct of my newly installed mod, ScamV, which "turns Los Santos into your digital playground." Let the possibilities unfurl ahead of you—"Take on the role of a cyber-criminal, exploit vulnerabilities, use cloned cards, and build your underground fortune."

Mostly, though, it has given me a bag. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that all of these things would be present in a regular installation of ScamV, but unfortunately ScamV in my world is forced to compete with an armageddon of other mods: the flying cars, new interiors, deleted exteriors, credit ratings and so on.

So mostly it is a bag. But wait, there is also this—the possibility of walking into a bank, any bank, and interacting with the teller by paying in fake cheques. "You don't have any fake cheques," the game tells me when I attempt this. It does not tell me where or how to obtain them. Kafka-esque. Five stars.

THEN:

NOW:

WHAT?

Vice City and Leonida, the fictional city and state that serve as the setting for Grand Theft Auto 6, are largely based on Miami and the state of Florida, and Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive are moving heavy and hard to leverage that real-life inspiration to promote GTA 6 as its console release gets closer.

The sheriff made no bones about her position on the matter when the proposed partnership came to light in September, however, characterizing the game as exactly the sort of thing Miami-Dade shouldn't associate with.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz said at the time. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent."

It was a hard line in the sand, but it didn't add up to much. Despite some opposition from local positions, much of it predicated on similar law-and-order concerns, those PR campaigns have moved ahead. The City of Miami Beach voted in September to approve a 'discreet' campaign, for instance, while the Kaseya Center, a downtown arena in Miami that serves as home of the NBA's Miami Heat, took a rather less subtle approach, erecting a massive "Welcome to Vice City" sign on its roof that can be seen by travellers flying into Miami International Airport.

The Kaseya Center campaign became even more prominent in October when the Heat, one of the NBA's highest-profile teams, became directly involved via the Night in Vice City campaign, a one-night-only promotion that will see both the arena and the team rebranded in Vice City livery. It is, as former US President Joe Biden once said, "a big fuckin' deal."

(It also revealed that our UK team does not know ball, but that's a whole different kind of problem.)

I thought the sheriff might take issue with such a high-profile embrace of a videogame she had so wholeheartedly decried just a month ago, Despite her previously-expressed opposition, though, she seemingly has no issue with the Heat hopping on board.

"Sheriff Cordero-Stutz’s comments focused on the proposed use of publicly owned facilities and infrastructure, including public transportation, transit stations, and Miami International Airport, to promote Grand Theft Auto 6," a sheriff's department representative told PC Gamer. "Her concerns addressed the message conveyed through the use of these public assets. Those comments were not directed at promotional decisions by private businesses or organizations."

I'm not sure how much of a difference the public/private thing makes in a practical sense—public or private, 'Miami is becoming Vice City' is the very high-profile crux of the campaign—but in spite of the many years passed since the Hot Coffee scandal, it's a needle that some are still trying to thread. The promo campaign approved by Miami Beach, for instance, will be managed by Boucher Brothers, a "hospitality management" company in Florida: Advertising materials will appear on things like Boucher Brothers chairs and umbrellas, rather than on city property.

Those chairs and umbrellas may appear on city property, which makes me think that trying to put some sort of minimum safe distance between them and the responsibilities of civic leadership might be largely moot.

On the other hand, the outright alarmism of days past has clearly receded. The glitzy rebranding of Miami and other parts of Florida speaks for itself, and Cordero-Stutz's admonishment notwithstanding, police don't seem too worried that pretending to be Vice City is going to turn Miami into actual Vice City: During the Miami Beach debates, for instance, one city commissioner said an officer he spoke to laughed off concerns about the impact of the game and promotional campaign on the city. Crass commercialism isn't really my bag but as someone who was around for the entire Jack Thompson era, I have to admit that this is kind of nice to see.

La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind." He wrote this some time before the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, and was likely referring to Mirror's Edge instead.

Regardless, it holds true today. And you know what? Whatever their qualities, the gentlemen of GTA 5 simply don't have much grace to them. They are lumpy, ambling figures, and move like young children unused to their bulk. I have rectified this using Back Flip Mod—a mod for back flip. "Simple backflip for Single Player," it says, with an alarmingly cavalier attitude to capitalisation and style-guide coherence.

But it's true. Now, with a tap of page down (enormous shoutout to the author for choosing page down, by the way: one of few keys left on my keyboard not already colonised by another mod) the lads of Los Santos will, whimsically, backflip in place. Then they'll get very pleased with themselves for pulling it off.

"There's a chance the backflip fails and your character ragdolls," notes the mod's author, which is delicious. Of course, in my testing so far, failures happen not mid-backflip but more at the conception of the backflip idea.

That is to say, you hit the backflip button and—if the dice roll deems it to be a failure—your character collapses immediately, without even moving. In fairness, many of my own ideas and impulses fail in precisely the same way.

The promotional blitz for Grand Theft Auto 6 continues rolling out, with the latest example being a cover feature in Love, a fashion magazine that only publishes two issues a year. I guess you've got to reach the people who don't know what the Miami Heat is somehow.

One of the things the feature focuses on is the satirical side of Grand Theft Auto, mentioning that in GTA 6, alongside radio talk shows and ads, you might overhear a robovoiced phonecall for a political campaign. The world will be full of real-world details, but amplified.

"It needs to wash over you when you're sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go," according to James Horton, whose job title is writing director: open world. "If you shift your focus onto something new, it's going to fill the frame, and it's going to push back."

"If you are going to put all this effort into creating a version of today's world, it has to be more over the top, more insane, more in your face," Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative said. "Otherwise, you could just go outside and live in the real world."

GTA 5 was already making fun of how invasive social media has become and how people don't believe what their doctors tell them. Even GTA's own voice actors have pointed out that the world's so weird now it's difficult to parody. Rockstar is determined to try, though. "There is a big focus on not just holding up a mirror, but on making everything satirical, larger than life, and more grotesque", Humphries said.

"Sometimes you need things to feel realistic to help with immersion, and conversely, sometimes you need to forego realism in favour of what's convenient for the player", said Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North.

The other focus of the article is on Lucia, GTA's first fully voiced woman protagonist, and on her relationship with co-star Jason. "We wanted both protagonists to be vulnerable, tough, flawed, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, able to learn from each other," game writer Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern said. "That's what we felt made them authentic, and a great team."

“When you are focusing on writing a fully realised person with their own wants," added game writer Alexa D’Agostino, "you're going to get something perfectly imperfect—with clichés, but also undeniably real."

At 8:35 am Central Time on Friday, October 2, PC Gamer audience development manager Cameron Bald shared a Twitter post by fan account GTA 6 Countdown. Miami's NBA basketball team, the Heat, is doing a cross-promotion event with Rockstar, "A Night in Vice City." The team will temporarily rebrand, though from what I can tell it's as "Vice City" and not "The Vice City Heat," which feels weird but what do I know.

None of us were particularly enthused by the branding exercise, but noted negative nelly and Glasgow-based PCG online editor, Fraser Brown, took particular umbrage, wondering "Who the hell doesn't know GTA is coming?" Cameron offered a fairly compelling rebuttal: "The super-casual types who are still on a PS4 and need convincing that GTA 6 is worth getting back into games over." Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton likened it to a chocolate bar at the checkout counter: This isn't an exercise in persuasion, but flooding the zone.

Fraser was not persuaded, doubting the efficacy of the campaign. We got our first indication that something was amiss at 8:54 am. "A basketball stunt is so much more niche than, say, the Netflix trailer," Fraser argued. Niche? The Miami Heat? The multi-billion dollar NBA franchise with three championship victories to its name? The one that signed LeBron for a while in the 2010s and made everybody mad (I don't really know ball either)? That Miami Heat?

Then, the whammy: "I guess it's gonna land differently with Americans. To me, this is insanely niche. I had to google Miami Heat."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

More step forward

I was just logging on to work myself at this time, and was floored at what had transpired. I let Fraser know that this was the most British thing he had ever said. PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker tried to liken it to the international popularity of British football clubs, which did not help, because Fraser also does not follow footy. Lauren pointed out that Fraser was effectively saying, "I don't see the marketing value of sports because I don't follow sports." Fraser dug in.

"I get using sports teams for marketing, but it feels niche when it's one local sports team in one country. But maybe Miami Heat is an extremely big deal all over the world. I would never know!"

I pointed out how I've seen guys in Russia wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys, to which Fraser responded that he was aware of the Bulls and has even owned merch. If there is one takeaway from this whole debacle, it is not the manifest weakening of America's global cultural hegemony. It is instead the continued dominance and recognition of America's finest city, the Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Chi-Town, baby. Did you know we have a pope?

"I have heard of the Miami Dolphins," Fraser remarked, perhaps as some manner of conciliatory gesture to his American colleagues, "but only because they featured in Ace Ventura."

Then, the other shoe dropped: "[To be fair], I also don't know what a Miami Heat is," news writer Joshua Wolens, who lives in England, unhelpfully proffered. "But I generally assume I don't know most of what's happening in the modern world."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 2

It was around this juncture that Fraser agreed to be subject to a formal write-up on PC Gamer dot com. I am not bullying my coworker. Buffalo-based PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter helpfully reframed the argument at this time as well: "It's not so much that the Miami Heat specifically is a big deal. It's that NBA teams, as a rule, are big deals." Lincoln also shared Forbes' estimated valuations of the most expensive NBA teams in the world vs. the most expensive football clubs. For what it's worth, the basketball teams are more expensive.

At 9:06 am, UK-based social video editor Paul Broughton introduced the new argument that "basketballs are a myth created by 2K to sell their annual videogame," but I think it would be dishonest of me to add him to the counter. The work chat conversation then moved in different directions, but I was haunted.

Dateline: Lunch

I took my lunch break to play some of the Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op mod with PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin and freelance contributor Tyler Colp. I remarked on the Fraser/Miami Heat situation, and how I couldn't get it out of my head.

"What is the Miami Heat?" Sean sheepishly asked. Sean is also English.

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 3

At almost the exact same time, former PC Gamer editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts, who has returned for some freelance work and is also an Englishman, entered the chat. I thought he was a man of the world. I thought surely he would know ball.

"I learned what they are two hours ago!" Sam informed us. "I'm aware of the Miami Dolphins." Unlike Fraser, Sam did not come by this knowledge through the works of Jim Carrey, but rather some kind of hazy osmosis through American podcasts. Sam did know about the Bulls though (Chicago baby da Bulls baby etc.)

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 4

Then things took a turn for the strange. Senior editor Christopher Livingston, who has lived in the United States his entire life (and also Orlando, Florida for five years), revealed that he also probably couldn't have placed the Heat prior to this morning's events. Man, what the fuck.

Americans Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

I can't stress enough that I'm not a basketball guy. I don't know why this lack of Miami Heat brand recognition is bothering me so much. Is this how my UK colleagues feel when I don't know what a chip sandwich, Mr. Blobby, or a bank holiday is? I feel like I'm being pranked.