One of the NFL's best teams is full of Grand Theft Auto Online roleplayers

(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

We're not living in the Dark Ages of Tipper Gore and "special episodes" of Law and Order anymore⁠—gaming's gone mainstream, and we'll all one day live to see the first gamer president, God have mercy on our souls. Still, you kind of expect high-profile gamers in non-gaming fields to be into more normie, palatable stuff: Madden, CoD, WoW, etc.

According to a recent report by the New York Times (readers may encounter a paywall), some star members of the Philadelphia Eagles are getting a little more funky with it, chilling out after work on modded GTA Online roleplay servers.

The players describe a familiar scene⁠—you get done with your nine-to-five and want to occupy yourself with literally anything else. The NYT report singles out safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and running back Kenneth Gainwell as the team's most dedicated gamers. Both maintain their own RP servers and stream regularly on Twitch, and Gardner-Johnson's streaming set-up is quoted as costing $10,000.

The report doesn't go into too much detail about what an average Eagles GTA session looks like, but there are some tantalizing tidbits. Gardner-Johnson mains a business owner and a police officer on his server, and apparently running back Miles Sanderson's character got locked up in the clinger on that same server.

It sounds like a good time to be honest, and I'm a big fan of how esoteric and nerdy it all is. It reminds me of PC Gamer favorite Henry Cavill's well-documented love affair with PC and tabletop gaming, just really niche and really genuine. Also, I gotta say I take a bit of pride at seeing cool, successful people who share my hobby. The Eagles are definitely doing something right, too⁠—they're currently 11-1 in the regular season.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.