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.

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

Sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do what's necessary. No sentimentality, no squeamishness—just pure, solution-oriented bluesky thinking. This philosophy once guided Maximilien de Robespierre and now it guides me, in my equally epochal struggle to simply make Grand Theft Auto 5 boot in spite of the vast cargo of mods I have now encumbered it with.

Long story short: the game ceased to launch even in windowed mode, which had hitherto been a surefire way to coax it from its deathbed. After many restarts and a lot of graphics noodling, I was forced to ask myself if this was it. If this was the end of my GTA journey.

Then I started deleting essentially random files from the game's directory and now it works. So let that be a lesson to you.

Now that's out of the way: new mod. This one is called TornadoV and what it does, you see, is it adds absolutely ginormous tornadoes to the already somewhat hectic map of Los Santos (or what remains of it). Hit F5 to configure your tornadoes, hit F6 to spawn them.

That last bit is a point of concern, as F6 is also my button to enable noclip and jet about the map at speed. So I can't do that without summoning a twister now, I guess. Okay.

It's good fun, anyway. Franklin really does go to pieces as the mod stuffs him in an express elevator to God's kingdom. As for the rest of the world, well, with everything in a constant state of explosion, fracas, and breakdown, a slowly migrating whirlwind really just sort of blends in.

There is an anxiety to my movements now. The stench of death lingers about Grand Theft Auto 5 like petrichor after hard, hot rain, and I am nervous that any addition will finally nudge it over the edge.

As we've previously established, the game now only launches properly in windowed mode, and once it churns through all the modifications I have burdened it with, it deposits me in an empty void where Franklin Clinton's house used to be, sending him tumbling through the abyss. Every time I load GTA 5, Franklin screams.

Anyway, I added a new mod. It's called Fortnite Floss Dance [OIV] and it adds "Smooth looping Floss dance, same speed as Fortnite." Convenience is its philosophy: whenever you begin flossing, music will play automatically, so you don't look weird. Don't like the music? Its volume is controlled by a slider. Also, the entire UI is in Arabic, which I did not expect when I downloaded it but which adds something indefinable that I like a lot.

What to say? Franklin flosses now. He flosses indiscriminately, indefatigably. Nothing can deter him. The ongoing chaos of a semi-deleted Los Santos does not faze him. His endlessly perishing and replenishing bodyguards do not concern him. Smash him with a car and he will only right himself and keep going. There is only him, the music, and a command in a language I do not speak but which I must assume reads 'Begin flossing'.

Videogames are so cool.

Do you like videogames

Can a game go on life support? Can it begin, in its dotage, to show signs of the ailment that everyone knows—but would never say—is the thing that will one day bring it down for good?

Grand Theft Auto 5 can. Installing my latest mod, Dynamic Traffic Colours, has brought my installation of the game to the point that it's failing death rolls. It will only launch in windowed mode, now. Trying to fullscreen the game before it has loaded will leave you suspended in the void. Quite literally: you will reside in an eternal black screen from which escape is impossible, unless you hold CTRL+ALT+DEL.

Anyway, once I was in and windowed, I encountered a mystery. The point of Dynamic Traffic Colours is to mix up the hues of Los Santos' cars. I think it is doing that, but with a conservatism that borders on timidity.

For the most part, the cars I see (and, to be fair, many of them more-or-less implode on spawn) are the same humdrum colours you get all the time. But then, like a vision, you get a car that's a garish mix of tints, sailing past you and into the side of a building.

So I don't really know what's going on there. Perhaps it's a lesson to change my thinking. Rather than letting me gorge myself on clown cars, the mod presents them like rare, nourishing treats: oases in the windowed desert. I'm thankful for that.

I have filled a yawning void in the soul of Los Santos. I have returned the heart to a heartless world. I am a teacher, a healer, a gardener of human happiness. My efforts have ensured the general flourishing of society and the wellbeing of the spaceship Earth.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has Working Hotdog Vendors now.

Based on the evidence, Rockstar probably intended the hot-dog-purchasing experience in GTA 5 to work much as it did in GTA 4. Why didn't it? A mystery. Dundee was busy working on horse testicles, or whatever it is they do up there, and forgot.

Anyway, it works now. You can now stroll up to the meat-slingers of Los Santos beach and give them five (thanks Obama) dollars for some sort of fleshy tube in a bun. This is electrifying.

The hot dogs heal you, just like in real life, but my favourite part is how they interact with the random-teleport mod I hucked onto my teetering GTA 5 pile just yesterday. One moment you'll be handing over your money, the next you will be perched atop the not-Hollywood sign, lazily chowing down on your grub. Also, the bodyguards that the celebrity mod has assigned you will keep manifesting in thin air next to you before plunging to their deaths. This does not interrupt the hot dog consumption process.

It's great. GTA 5 should have been like this the whole time. I can only hope that GTA 6, with its budget of 'roughly Saddam Hussein's gold bullion reserves,' will let you fully experience hot dogs.

It's the greatest challenge I've yet faced. Not in Grand Theft Auto 5, in life (I was a sheltered child). Forget hit squads, forget running a billion-dollar privacy-invading company, forget bad credit, forget the absence of gravity. My enemy now is space itself, the third dimension. Maybe spacetime. Never been clear on what that is.

I have installed the Random Teleport Challenge, which is not a challenge in the American Gladiators sense but more of a challenge in the debilitating disease sense. Every 50 seconds, the game whisks me to one of 28 locations scattered across GTA 5's map. I have no list of which locations these are, which makes the whole thing quite exciting.

I don't know how you live your life, but for me, it's actually quite disruptive to find myself randomly spatially displaced every 50 seconds. It's probably how the Quantum Leap guy felt, if he sometimes Quantum Leapt underneath a truck.

It's a confusing and disconcerting time. Utterly impossible to plan for. But you know what? It taught me an important lesson, probably. Not sure what it is yet, but this seems like one of those things people turn around at the end of and say they learnt an important lesson, so there must be one in there somewhere.

This will probably make it quite difficult to experience mods going forward. I may have to edit an .ini file. Or maybe I just live like this now, ever jaunting. Ever lost in the creases of the sheets of the universe. Just check under the nearest truck; I'm probably there.

Every nation has its kooks—excepting of course the Swiss—but there's something utterly American to me about the UFO sighting. It's probably something to do with the sheer size of the place. A tired, potentially hopped-up trucker, trundling across the endless plains of… whatever state has endless plains in it, spying something mysterious and illuminated in the canopy above? That's America to me.

Also America to me: the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, so it was only natural that I bring real UFO visits to Rockstar's fake LA. I installed UFO Sightings, "a simple script that spawns a UFO at random locations throughout the map."

Its aim is to be eerie and mysterious, which is probably why it limits UFOs to appearing at night. I didn't know that at first, though, so I spent quite a lot of time flying around Mount Chiliad at high noon, trying and failing to find visitors from other worlds. I did find the now-ever-present swarms of hitmen trying to kill me, though, so I had fun.

Once I realised my error, I nudged the game clock forward. Voila! All of a sudden, a distant part of the map glowed red. "UFO sighting reported" declared a pop-up. My reaction was swift—I immediately took flight (I have Superman powers; don't worry about it) and headed towards the marked zone.

Now, look, here's where things didn't quite go as I planned. In my idyllic visions, the American spaceman-spotter sees a hazy disc in the middle distance. He squints, he rubs his eyes, he thinks but is never sure that the object he's looking at is aliens, and there is no one in a 10-mile radius to back him up when he talks about it later. His defining trait is uncertainty. If he speaks, he becomes a disbelieved outcast. If he keeps quiet, the questions haunt him to his grave.

The truth wasn't quite so romantic or secretive: My UFO appeared about 30 feet in the air over an intersection in downtown Los Santos, flashing with enough enthusiasm to immediately kill anyone who's even familiar with epilepsy.

I guess it worked out. At some point, possibly in response to me shooting it with my laser eyes, it stopped flashing and began to ascend, eventually vanishing completely. Maybe I never saw it. Perhaps it was never there at all.

Have you heard? Crazy Taxi is coming back. As a game, yes (with some rather off-putting gen-AI mixed in there), and also as a movie. You may have heard this. What you have not heard is that I, personally, am bringing Crazy Taxi back. I am bringing it back to Los Santos, to Grand Theft Auto 5.

Simply put, I have installed the aptly-named Crazy Taxi Mod, which has populated my doomed and bedraggled city with a new variety of quest: a taxi quest. A crazy taxi quest.

Approach a yellow circle and the game will prompt you to hit H. Hit H and you will enter a world of point-to-point transportation. The mod gives you a selection of cars, all yellow, and none of which I can remember because all the cars in my game are seized by irresistible movement, which means they immediately jet off the vehicle-select screen as soon as they appear.

An added consequence of this behaviour is that you have to choose a car quickly. The mod will teleport you into the one you've chosen, whatever its location. Wait too long, and the car you want to drive will have either taken flight or ploughed into the side of a building and exploded.

Regardless, once you're in, it's pure Crazy Taxi. You've got a time limit and the sidewalks have punters. Pick them up and your time limit extends. The goal is rapidity, to keep your pickups and dropoffs frequent enough that your time limit is actually growing in the aggregate, rather than depleting.

Or it would be, but my various fares keep getting scared off by the rolling gang war that Los Santos has, at this point, descended into. Or they get hit by cars, or shot by my bodyguards, or they have bad credit maybe. Who knows? Point is, they sometimes fail to actually get in the car, leaving me idling my big yellow taxi forlornly at the side of the road, eternally.

But aren't we all doing that in some way, when you think about it?

What happened

• On September 10, Rockstar Games published new mod guidelines on its website, which it says are intended to "maintain a fun, creative, and welcoming place for players and content creators."
• The guidelines are seem primarily targeted at mods for the FiveM and RedM platforms, which Rockstar acquired—along with their developers—in 2023.
• Rockstar says mods must "respect our games": As part of its "right to set limits on how others can use our games and brand," the studio says mods can't expand or modify official storylines, missions, and characters, and can't combine settings and characters from different Rockstar franchises.
• Rockstar says modders can't incorporate other intellectual property or real-world likenesses, and forbids cheat menus or modifications that interfere with its official multiplayer and online services.
• Rockstar calls its official modding platforms "the exclusive licensed home for our community to monetize their mods," forbidding alternative monetization or commercialization of mods for its games.

Do these guidelines have any teeth?

Like Rockstar's more formal terms of service and platform license agreements, these guidelines are the sort of standard rhetorical armament a company equips itself with when in case it needs a quick fix for something egregious: If a mod emerges that could give the studio a legal or financial headache, all it'll need to do is tap the sign before giving the offending user-generated content the boot.

Of course, those guidelines are theoretically more difficult to enforce on platforms the studio doesn't own. For Rockstar, removing a mod that breaks its commandments is easy enough on FiveM. But if that mod's on a third party site—like the one our Josh Wolens used to murder a charmander on the streets of Los Santos—making that problem go away isn't so simple. House rules are a lot harder to enforce at someone else's house.

That hasn't stopped Rockstar in the past, however: In 2021, it sent takedown notices to a number of modding projects that reverse-engineered, restored, or reimplemented elements of older GTA games. It announced and released its trio of GTA Trilogy remasters later that year.

It might feel minnowish compared to modern open worlds, but Los Santos is still a schlep to get across. Whether you're on a bike, in a car, or hoofing it on-foot, it takes a while to get from the city itself out to the northernmost boonies. Well, no more.

Flights V is a mod that turns GTA 5's airports into, ah, airports. That is to say, you can now rock up to a desk in the terminal, pick up a ticket, and jet off (as a passenger) to one of a select few other points on the map: LSIA, Sandy Shore Airfield, McKenzie Airfield, or Paleto Bay International Airport.

I'm not entirely sure that the real-world LAX airport maintains routes to podunk personal hangars out in the middle of the desert, but America is a strange and bewildering place.

It is a replication of the true airport experience par excellence. You know how in airports you can choose what kind of plane you want to travel on, and how the space between the jet bridge and the plane itself is protected by a vast bank-vault door? We've got that. You know how the departures lounge is filled with dead-eyed half-people staring listlessly into the void? That's here too.

Okay, that one actually is accurate, I guess.

My only issue is that actually trying to board a plane can sometimes result in an infinite loading screen. This is inexplicable. It is assuredly not related to previous mods that have deleted a vast swathe of the exterior world map, nor my attempts to carry NPCs on my back into the plane. It's just plane travel, you know? They always find ways to make it a little bit worse.

As reported by IGN, a trove of data from Rockstar has made its way online, with the big ticket items being Grand Theft Auto 5's source code, remnants of canceled GTA5 singleplayer DLC, as well as an early version of GTA6's map that can be loaded into the prior game.

It's unclear how or why the data is making the rounds now, but the consensus appears to be that it was first extracted from Rockstar in the infamous 2022 Lapsus hack that revealed GTA6 to the world.

GTA YouTuber TJGM has a video and a number of posts on X covering the long-rumored Liberty City project. The gameplay in the video comes from a canceled mod, and not the leaked material. The most notable thing TJGM showed off is a map of audio loading zones contained in the leak: The demarcation for coastal ambient audio could be turned into an effective map of the multi-island city. This iteration of Liberty City would have been larger, and possessed a different layout from its most recent predecessor in GTA4.

User affmal on Twitter has been sharing screenshots and findings mostly focused on the Agent Trevor files, which appear to be more intact and substantial than the Liberty City stuff. Affmal has shared a full mission list, and has been loading map and model data into GTA5 to explore. The coolest thing affmal has shown off, for my money, is an underwater base map like something out of Deus Ex.

TJGM has a few posts showing screenshots of an early version of GTA6's map loaded into GTA5, with markers (unclear if from Rockstar for dev purposes or placed by the user) denoting areas like "Alligator Farm," "Coast Guard," and "Disused Theme Park." The map is "very unfinished" according to TJGM, and reportedly dates to 2015. He has three posts showing corresponding locations from this unfinished map and GTA6's trailers side-by-side for comparison.

This is only the latest development in a GTA6 build-up that has been defined by major leaks, and it's possible there is still more to be uncovered in this tranche. GTA6 itself will finally release on November 19, but not on PC. While Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick acknowledged that "the PC platform is becoming more and more important" in a recent meeting, there's still no word on when we can expect the hotly anticipated crime sim on our system of choice.

In a previous life, long before I began making millions writing about videogames professionally, I wrote marketing copy for a finance firm I still don't really understand. Do you know the fine art of embedding payment iframes in customer payment gateways? I did. Once. Do you know the riotous history of the SWIFT international banking system? What about SEPA? No? What a sheltered life you must lead.

My point is this: absolutely nothing is more interesting, cooler, or sexier than finance and banking. We all know it. There was a whole song that was pretty much about just that. And now, I have integrated this glamour into Grand Theft Auto 5. I have installed Realistic Bank System – San Andreas ONE.

Exciting times: I can get into debt now. The thrill of thrills is that San Andreas ONE lets you apply for lines of credit in ways that are fascinatingly reminiscent of real life. GTA 5's protagonists even get actual, meaningful credit scores (based on… something) that impact their eligibility to open new lines of the stuff. Franklin's was 680 (Good), in case you're wondering. That gave him a positive soft eligibility for getting a loan. Yes, this thing has soft and hard credit checks.

Anyway, I got a $30,000 line of credit and set it as my default payment method. Anything I purchased in GTA 5 would go onto the credit card, not my actual money, at least until I maxed the thing out. This was largely immaterial, as in my position as megacelebrity and CEO of Facebook, I am incontinentally rich. But still, nice to have.

The only thing that didn't quite take was the mod's implementation of physical bank branches. I could go in, sure, and mix with the hoi polloi who also wander in to do their banking, but I couldn't actually interact with the teller. In fairness, this might be because of the constant, chaotic churn of my modded Los Santos, which is ever disgorging flaming corpses in and around their desks. I guess it would be sort of hard to work in those conditions.

I grew up by a dry riverbed. This was, on the whole, positive, because what a big empty riverbed is good for is setting things on fire, firing air rifles, and walloping golf balls into orbit. Some say they never stopped travelling. They're still out there, somewhere, in the space between the stars.

The reason Grand Theft Auto 5 is worse than a riverbed is that you can't do that last thing. Or, well, you can, but only at officially designated golf courses, which are prisons for the soul. I have now fixed this omission. I installed Street Golf, which lets you play golf, but in the street.

Much like the previous two mods I've bolted onto GTA 5's sagging frame (LifeInvader Business Mod and Become A Celebrity), I was immediately impressed by how much of the mod there is. This is no ramshackle creation—the possibility of equipping a golf club and whacking some balls in the street—but comes with a suite of tweakable menus, golf stats, and potent balltypes. Normal balls? Yes. Fire balls? Absolutely. Detonating balls? Very much so. And super balls, which you can set to travel about 200x further than any other ball in your arsenal.

Being as I am now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, who is instantly replaced by an almost-identical bodyguard whenever he happens to get pancaked by a flying car or assassinated by a squad of mercenaries, I opted to use him as a kind of ambulatory mini-golf windmill.

My shots were angled towards him, alternately sending him cartwheeling hilariously down the street, sending him cartwheeling even further down the street (super ball, you see), or setting him on fire. The detonating balls never quite worked. The mod procced some sort of achievement when I successfully nailed him in the dome with a maximum-power shot.

It's a pleasant distraction. Whenever the travails of my life in Los Santos get too much I can, at any moment, drop into Golf Mode. Would that real life were the same way.

You might have heard that I am Mark Zuckerberg now. This is true. Indisputable, even. But something isn't right—wherever he went, Zuckerberg Cool Original was recognised. He was a famous, or infamous man. When I stroll around Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5, even as the enormously wealthy owner of its barely-disguised Facebook parody, no one recognises me.

No longer. I have installed the Become a Celebrity mod (coincidentally, from the same author as the LifeInvader Business Mod), with the aim of becoming a prominent man about town. As with the LifeInvader mod, it's actually rather impressive in its feature set: the mod measures your public approval and your overall fame on separate axes, and allows you to undertake little repeatable quests to change both.

You start out, naturally, at zero fame, and the only things you can do to improve it are so-called "Z-lister" gigs. This means: busking. This means: busking upwards of 20 times at disparate locations scattered around Los Santos, each performance netting you about $500 and 0.5 fame points (which is not many fame points). This is fairly arduous, and made harder by all the flying cars, gang warfare, etcetera.

Also, people don't seem to appreciate it. As Franklin stood on the steps of city hall, strumming his heart on guitar, only his hired bodyguard offered any applause. Elsewhere, Los Santos either looked on impassively, ignored him, or died (due to the hazards, you see). Sometimes, to be fair to the stoic crowd, Franklin's guitar-playing animation would not trigger, and his 15-second performance would consist of him standing still and sort of grimacing.

I did it, though. All 20 gigs, eventually letting me crest a new summit of fame and take on a whole new type of gig: the Meet and Greet. In a sunny spot in the Los Santos business district, my fans gathered to revere and adulate me. They whooped, they clapped, they bounced up and down as Franklin stood stock-still and stared blankly into the middle distance. This is what it's all about. This is what I deserve.

The event was brought to an end when a significant portion of my fanbase was hit by a truck.

Let's skip the preamble: I am Mark Zuckerberg now. The original Mark Zuckerberg? Who cares? He's knocked out in a ditch somewhere. Whatever. He's the past; I am the future. Specifically, the future of Mark Zuckerberg, who I am.

The latest mod I have installed into my increasingly uncontrollable build of Grand Theft Auto 5 is LifeInvader Business Mod, which grants you the ability to buy Rockstar's thinly veiled (which is to say, not veiled at all) parody of Facebook for the cool sum of a million bucks. I did not actually have a million bucks, but one of the 46,000 other mods I have installed let me grant myself that amount at the office's front door. In real life, this is called quantitative easing.

The mod is actually quite robust. It's not just a matter of buying the website and letting passive income roll in. You get a whole new menu through which you can staff up—acquiring devs of varying levels of talent—expand your server capacity, and even hire security to keep the hoi polloi away. You can donate to charity to buff your business' reputation, and have to keep an eye on staff morale.

Staff morale, by the way, is largely unimpacted by the flying car which has careened through the second floor window and begun gyrating around the server racks, gathering a pursuing swarm of monitors and wastepaper baskets behind it like a Saab Pied Piper. Nor do they mind, particularly, when armed men burst in and try to shoot their CEO, and they are equally unfazed when that CEO uses his laser vision to turn those men to hot slag.

Actually, while all this was ongoing, the mod kept serving me notifications: staff morale was at a steady 100% because the boss had showed up in the office, which is both appreciated and also not my experience of what happens when the boss shows up in the office. But Facebo—sorry, LifeInvader's developers are made of a different, hardier stock. It's a privilege to own them.

Here's some logic for you: Grand Theft Auto 6—fattened on its billions—cannot help but be the greatest game of all time. This I have gathered from the apocalyptic euphoria that surrounds its release. But GTA 6 is not out yet, and the greatest game of all time, currently, is The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PlayStation 2, original Xbox, and GameCube.

Ergo, QED, post hoc ergo propter hoc, abracadabra: GTA 6 will basically be like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.

With that key fact in mind, and with the aim of continuing to transform Grand Theft Auto the fifth into a facsimile of GTA 6 (this time on PC), I have installed Superman V into GTA 5. Your heroes now have laser eyes (also cryo eyes, pulse eyes, solar flare eyes, and so on), super speed, freeze breath, the ability to fly, and X-ray vision—which so far as I can tell is a heat-haze effect that happens intermittently.

I have waved goodbye to guns, much like the protagonist of A Farewell To Arms, who also probably did that after learning he could set people on fire by staring at them.

It works alarmingly well. I can ignite passing cars with my heat vision, freeze cops where they stand, and subject Los Santos' now-roving ambient hit squads to the carcinogenic effects of sustained X-ray exposure. I can also fly, which sometimes works, and sometimes results in Franklin, Michael, or Trevor tumbling lazily but uncontrollably through the sky, like an airborne flower.

My only concern is that, at this point, I am rapidly running out of keys on my keyboard with which to activate the various mods I have installed. At time of writing, hitting any of my function keys will summon a pile-up of distinct mod menus: Enhanced Native Trainer, Menyoo, the one that controls giving people piggybacks, the one that controls summoning dogs. What if what breaks by the end of this thing is not GTA 5, but my ability to control it?

In the wake of GTA 6, series veterans will wax nostalgically about the era of Rockstar expansion packs. No sooner had you finished The Lost and Damned, they'll tell their nurse in between spoonfuls of prunes, The Ballad of Gay Tony landed on your hard drive. There was none of this 'waiting a decade for a new GTA' nonsense.

Fewer will remember the first age of Grand Theft Auto, when even the expansion packs had expansion packs. Really—GTA birthed GTA: London, which in turn begat GTA: London 1961. The latter was released for free online in the summer of 1999, where only a subset of disc-spinning PC gamers were ever likely to find it. Which might have been for the best. Because GTA: London 1961 is perhaps the most punishing visit to the British capital ever conceived. Even including 28 Days Later, and the press reception of Meghan and Harry.

The original Grand Theft Auto already demanded a lot from its players—splicing a nascent open world structure with the limited lives and scorechasing of the arcades. To pass a given level, you'd need to complete several back-to-back chains of missions, thereby building a sufficient multiplier to reach the target score. Getting busted would halve your multiplier instantly. And since cops only needed to bump into you to effect an arrest, like a ghost in Pac-Man, you could easily wind up back at square one, with a dwindling pool of missions to pick from.

To this brutal ruleset, the designers of GTA: London 1961 decided to add mission timers tighter than Adam West's batsuit. How does 20 seconds from East Bermondsey to West Southwark strike you? Or 30 from Westminster Palace to the City of London, where the bankers work? Even in GTA's shrunken top-down metropolis, it's an extraordinary ask—only possible if you pick precisely the right route, floor it, and somehow avoid any serious collisions along the way. "You got to be a little faster," explains your cock-er-ney paymaster, helpfully. "Or Harold'll have your guts for gardening with!"

And should you fail, even once? Those same gangsters will throw you out on your arse, ending the mission with no way of recovery. "This ain't some leisurely afternoon stroll with a stunning bird! This is major international crime, and time and crime waits for Norman, as Harold once said! You blew it, you nob!"

I can't help but wonder how Harold can afford to be so picky with his drivers. If he's got Charlie Croker on the other end of the blower, why is he talking to me in the first place? Good riddance.

Except, without the largesse of old Harold, making money in London is no walk in the park. It might be a drive through Hyde Park, knocking down pedestrians in precise combos to try and max out your score the hard way. Or a slow, repetitive shift at the docks, feeding endless stolen cars to the crane in exchange for £100 notes. I scuppered my chances there by rolling an enormous red bus halfway into the Thames, blocking the crane and making future deliveries impossible.

Thankfully, I'm not the first person to be astonished by the obscenity of those mission timers. And GTA: London 1961 belongs to a time when in-game values could be easily tweaked via notepad files buried on your PC. A kind fellow traveller named Duckilous left instructions on the GTA Forums—an added 30 seconds here, an extra 2375 frames there—and it's no exaggeration to say that those simple inputs are transformative. "I am not a modder for the classic GTA games," my saviour writes. "This is something I just figured out in one day."

Duckilous' GTA London: 1961 remains a frantic, frazzling dash through pixellated renderings of some of the world's most famous landmarks. But that extra inch of breathing room makes all the difference. Another half a minute per mission means you actually have time to read what your objectives are before haring off towards them.

You even get a moment to appreciate the, ah, prose: "What the hell are you doing? You left Mr Caukenbolls all alone. Now some gang has kidnapped him. You'd better find him and get him back here, unharmed! A miss is as good as a moron in this game, mate."

Crucially, the added time means you get to complete more objectives, and therefore access more missions further down the chain. Among GTA: London 1961's scenarios are the theft of a rival gangster's clothes during a pond swim, the filming of a bespoke documentary for Harold to watch at home, and the first-ever implementation of driveby mechanics in the series. There's even a bit of Bond-lite cruising in a Jaguar with a union jack paint job, called the Jug Swinger.

But it's all over pretty fast. This, I now realise, is what the vicious timers were likely covering for: a damning scarcity of scripted missions. I managed to complete four of seven and, having failed the others, was left scraping around to make up the shortfall in my level score.

When run over with a 3x multiplier, policemen yield 3000 points each, and I calculated I'd need to pancake only about a dozen to reach the target. But eventually, even the coppers stopped showing up. London's streets turned eerily quiet, as if every last response unit in Scotland Yard had at last been totalled or exploded. The war was over.

In the end, I was combing the city from Camden to Camberwell, searching for one last way to eke out enough damage to sufficiently impress London's criminal class. And eventually, I found it: a tank parked on a football field. The cars and buildings of Westminster rocked with concussive force as rockets flew. Buckingham Palace's window bill for 1962 would be enormous. But I could finally say I'd completed GTA's toughest challenge to date. Give or take a 30 second timer.

You've no doubt spent dozens of hours in GTA 5 doing millions of dollars of property damage with your fleet of speeding vehicles and arsenal of deadly weapons.

But what if you could do something good for the city of Los Santos while still satisfying your insatiable bloodlust and appetite for destruction? For example, blowing up and running down a couple hundred Flock cameras.

Thanks to the GTALPR mod (which stands for Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader), you can! The mod adds 235 Flock cameras to GTA 5, and in the modder's words, you can "do whatever the flock you want" to 'em. Shoot 'em. Smash 'em. Take 'em out with cars and tanks and shotguns. And you can even make a tidy profit while fighting back against the surveillance state.

What's especially cool about GTALPR, created by modder Morry, is that these cameras aren't just static props, they actually work. They'll photograph you as you drive past them, and you can save and format these photos for social media or your own scrapbook. The cameras will also alert the cops to your location, sometimes even if you're not breaking any laws—just like real Flock cameras are prone to do, because they suck.

Destroying the Flock cameras drops a bundle of components you can sell for extra cash, a nice bonus at $600 a pop. And if you want to go on a rampage, "there is built-in speedrun functionality, with a stats screen tracking number of cameras destroyed, and fastest time to destroy 10, 50, or all cameras," Morry says. That's rad. The mod also lets you place your own in-game cameras to save snapshots of your exploits around the city.

"Anyway, Flock is a scourge on America," the modder states bluntly on TikTok. "It's a private eight billion dollar surveillance company that operates over 100,000 cameras across the country. If you think the 235 in this mod are bad, just understand that that is literally one tenth of the cameras currently installed in LA County, which Los Santos is based on."

The modder, however, warns at the end of the video that "destroying Flock cameras in real life is illegal and will not, as far as we know, give you a loot box with $600."

Works for me. Learn more about the mod here, and grab it for yourself on Github. And thanks to FRVR for spotting the mod.

Despite vocal opposition from some commissioners, the city of Miami Beach has voted in favor of a Grand Theft Auto 6 promotional campaign that will see Rockstar drop a reported $3 million on the city in exchange for what looks to be some surprisingly light-touch advertising.

The vote on the proposal was streamed on September 10 on the City of Miami Beach YouTube channel, and it was close, finishing at 4-3 in favor. Opposition to the campaign was rooted in familiar concerns about the nature of the GTA games themselves: Violent, criminal, and just a bad influence all around.

"Grand Theft Auto is an adult videogame where players steal cars, deal drugs, commit robberies, murder civilians, and assassinate police officers," commissioner David Suarez said to kick things off. "That's their right. They can make it, they can sell it, and they can advertise it. But that doesn't mean that the city of Miami Beach has to help them do it.

"We ask our police officers every day to put themselves in harm's way protecting this community. We spend enormous resources fighting drugs, violent crime, and disorder. And we've spent over a million dollars over the past three years on a spring break marketing campaign trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness. Now, we're going to take our beaches, one of the most recognizable symbols of this city, and turn them into a space for Grand Theft Auto. What kind of message are we sending to the world?"

Suarez also played a montage of clips from past GTA games and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, showcasing an extensive range of crimes that players can commit: "I for one don't want Miami Beach associated with this connotation of a brand. I don't think that this is worth what they're offering. I don't think it's worth really anything."

Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas countered by pointing out that "we're not going to be doing live action GTA in the city. We're not giving away pistols and cocaine to people." Instead, she said, the campaign is about people who play GTA, and videogames in general, who aren't going to embark on crime sprees because of a videogame, but who might just drop a lot of sweet tourist dollars on Miami Beach.

Money was also a focal point for commissioner Joseph Magazine, who said GTA 6 is coming to the world regardless of what Miami Beach does. "That spotlight's coming. The question remains whether we actually stand on the sidelines and allow that narrative and die to be cast or whether we actually take control and create an opportunity that works for the residents."

Rattling off a list of projects the city has had to put off due to lack of funding, he continued, "Protecting Miami Beach doesn't mean hiding. It doesn't mean shooing something away that's going to happen. It means the confidence to engage, to strike partnerships, to actually take control over something that we can embrace."

Magazine added that he'd spoken to police about it, and it seems like they're not particularly concerned: "One actually kind of laughed at me, he goes, 'Dude, you think a videogame is going to change what we do in the city or that's what we're worried about?'"

Interestingly, it sounds like this campaign will be fairly subtle compared to the excesses of GTA itself. Commissioner Laura Dominguez said GTA 6 logos won't appear on city property like lifeguard chairs or "iconic public places," but instead "will be advertised discreetly with our partner, the Boucher Brothers ... it'll be on their chairs and their umbrellas."

Boucher Brothers is a Florida-based "hospitality management" company that provides services to municipalities in the state. Amusingly, it's also famous enough that it's being parodied in Grand Theft Auto 6 as Sol Sisters, whose umbrellas can be seen in the background of the first GTA 6 trailer. The similarity in design is hard to miss.

Despite the hand-wringing from some commissioners, the vote ultimately passed 4-3, authorizing the Miami Beach city manager to negotiate a deal with Rockstar for a GTA 6 marketing campaign.

It should be noted that, as far as I can tell, this campaign is different from the proposed collaboration with Miami-Dade County that came to light last week: Miami Beach is a resort city within the county, and this particular campaign was focused on that city specifically. That could indicate that other such collaborations, with other cities in Florida, are in the works—I've reached out to Rockstar to ask and will update if I receive a reply.

The Independent Workers of Great Britain union held a rally today in Glasgow, Scotland to mark the beginning of the final workplace tribunal hearing that will resolve the case of 31 former Rockstar employees who were fired by the company in October 2025.

The dispute turns on the cause of the terminations, or lack thereof: Rockstar says the employees were fired for leaking information about "upcoming and unannounced" games in a public forum, while the IWGB says it's plain-and-simple union busting, and that Rockstar further erred by firing the employees immediately rather than following a disciplinary process or granting the former employees any opportunity to appeal. The fired employees are seeking a ruling declaring that their terminations were unfair, along with reinstatement or compensation.

"We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights," IWGB union president Alex Marshall said. "After a year of fighting to get answers, we hope this tribunal will finally back them into a corner and bring the truth to light. As the world gets its first proper look at GTA 6, this hearing will give people a chance to look behind the scenes at what happened to the workers who helped make it."

One especially powerful moment at the rally was a speech given by former Rockstar programmer Rachel Crawford, who worked on Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and was among the employees terminated in 2025.

Closing out the rally, @nershly.bsky.social beautifully speaks about her experience being fired by Rockstar and how they try to use fear.

— @austinkelmore.com (@austinkelmore.com.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T13:29:32.149Z

"The modern workplace runs on fear. Fear of speaking out. Fear of being punished. Fear of being fired, losing your livelihood and even your home.

"On October 30 2025, I was fired by Rockstar Games. I was fired without warning and without even being given a clear answer as to what it was I'd done to deserve it. Within minutes, I was out the door, feeling humiliated and ashamed, and ever since I've replayed that day in my head, wondering what I could or should have done differently.

"On that day, fear asserted its dominance. I felt its claws deep in my heart, urging me to run with my tail between my legs and never to look back. I saw it in my former colleagues, too afraid to talk to me or even, in some cases, to look at me. I heard it every time the ones who did speak to me told me how powerless they felt to do anything to stop or undo what had happened, even though they knew it was wrong.

"Fear wants to rule us. It closes our minds, our hearts, and our horizons. It makes us small, sad and hopeless.

"But today, we are fighting fear. This long-awaited hearing is an opportunity to put fear in its place below us. Over the next five weeks we will face fear and show that we refuse to be silenced by it. In spite of fear, we will stand up proudly, speak our truth, and demand a better industry—a better world—that we all deserve.

"And we're not just fighting fear in the courtroom. Many of my former colleagues at Rockstar Games have taken up the union's flag and are now pushing for the recognition, protection, and power that fear has denied them for too long. Fear will not defeat them and it will not defeat us. Union makes us strong."

The hearing is set to run until October 16, just over a month ahead of the console release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which happens on November 19. The union and fired workers are asking people not to boycott the game, saying in August that "we spent years pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity into making GTA, and we want people to experience the universe that we helped build." Instead, supporters who want to do a solid for the cause are encouraged to contribute to a fundraising campaign launched by the IWGB in support of the legal action against Rockstar.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Rockstar reiterated its defense on the matter. "“Rockstar Games' position has been clear and consistent throughout," a Rockstar representative said. "Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.”

Every new Rockstar game is more simulation-heavy than the last, and Grand Theft Auto 6 aims to bring players closer to real-life in a variety of ways. One of these is the addition of vehicle refuelling, which will require players to stop off at gas stations (or petrol stations if you're a Brit like me) and watch your disposable income vanish in a stream of fossilised plant matter.

This mechanical tweak has proved somewhat controversial among Grand Theft Auto players, with some believing that refuelling cars will be inconvenient and interrupt the flow of driving and shooting the series is built upon. Yet while Rockstar is sticking to its guns on the matter of refuelling, co-studio head Rob Nelson recently stated that filling up your car won't be a massive drag on your adventure across Vice City.

Nelson's comments come via YouTuber TGG (via GamesRadar+) who recently saw an extended preview of Rockstar's hotly anticipated crime sim, which included refuelling in action. TGG says that gas stations allow players to both repair and refuel cars, and facilitate recharging for electric vehicles alongside refuelling for cars powered by internal combustion engines. Selecting the refuel/recharge option triggers a refuelling cutscene that TGG says lasts around 10 seconds.

The preview was apparently overseen by Nelson, who commented on the refuelling during play. "Hey, that's pretty fast for a fill up," Nelson observed when getting gas. "You can't complain about that." It also appears there is some trepidation within Rockstar about the refuelling, as when discussing the system with TGG, Nelson stated. "We'll see what people say," before asking "Do you think people are going to like it?"

For his part, TGG reckons that "Fuel isn't really going to be an issue unless you're not thinking about what you're doing". And I think this is probably going to be the case for most people unless Rockstar makes the need to refuel too frequent. When Red Dead Redemption 2 arrived in 2018, some players complained about the simulation-heavy elements of that, like how Arthur Morgan moved and having to fiddle around with your saddlebags for inventory management.

Officials with Miami-Dade County have held talks with Rockstar about using facilities and landmarks in the county to promote the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, according to a recent report by The Miamian, saying it could represent "a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience." Just one problem: the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office is dead-set against it.

The Miamian report (via RPS) says the county submitted a pitch deck to Rockstar on June 29, after which staff had "some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6," said Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

"Nothing has been formally agreed to or approved, and any idea would have to go through the appropriate review and approval process," Suarez said. "Given Miami-Dade's clear influence on the game, we think there could be a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience."

Miami-Dade is the inspiration for Vice City in the GTA series, and by "inspiration" I mean it basically is Vice City, although Miami exists as a separate city in the game's fiction. Vice City will serve as a central location in GTA 6, and will represent the seat of Vice-Dale County, much as the city of Miami is the county seat of Miami-Dade. Given that, the campaign makes obvious sense, and most of the ideas floated don't sound too overly disruptive.

Some examples:

• A display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos and a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim at Miami International Airport
• Vice City signage and colors at the Metromover and Metrorail transit stations
• Vice City-inspired installations or public art at PortMiami
• A "family appropriate" celebration of "Miami car culture" with cars, bikes, DJs, food, artists, and branded installations at Tropical Park
• A Vice City Radio Lab at the city's main library, providing access to recording, editing, and digital media equipment to support "music production, podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling, sound engineering, video-game development, and other creative programming, while reflecting the central role that music and radio play in the GTA experience

The pitch also includes ideas for Rockstar funding permanent upgrades to county infrastructure:

That all sounds pretty cool to me, and some of it is quite civically wholesome, too. Yes, it's all part of the monstrous marketing machine for the biggest videogame of all time, but it also seems like the county is coming at it as a way to celebrate the real people and civic culture that led Rockstar to embrace Miami in the first place, and that counts for something.

The big stumbling block, of course, is that the GTA games are the polar opposite of civic-minded and wholesome, and that's led Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz to speak out against the idea.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz told the Miami Herald. "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."

Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez also spoke out against the idea: "We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence."

The sheriff isn't wrong. GTA games have always been notoriously violent: Former attorney Jack Thompson, at one time the videogame industry's foremost nemesis, spent years campaigning hard against the games and publisher Take-Two Interactive before he was finally disbarred for his relentless antics and misconduct.

But the game industry, and its audience, have matured in the 25 years (that's right, look it up) since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed everything: GTA is still steeped in criminal violence, but the shock factor—and the hand-wringing over it—are long gone. These days it's completely mainstream, as evidenced by the performance of the GTA 6 reveal showcase on Netflix, which was the platform's biggest show of the week.

Would Miami-Dade have to tone down some of the seedier elements of GTA 6 for its "family appropriate" events? Sure. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of sheriff's deputies and police in the county grew up playing GTA themselves, and I bet an awful lot of them will be calling in sick when GTA 6 drops.

Okay, two things. First: Los Santos Customs will be taking a hiatus next week, as I spend nine days in a row sleeping and attempting to develop the antibodies to counter whatever exotic German illness it is I acquired at Gamescom 2026.

Second: it's snowing in Los Santos, just like the real-life LA.

I have installed WinterV Beta, with the aim of making Grand Theft Auto 5's weather a little more interesting than it usually is. The pitch is simple: what if there was snow? Well, reader, having played a little GTA 5 with WinterV Beta, I can assure you that there very much is snow. Plus, all the world's lighting takes on a kind of a sickly, ochre hue, which is also just like LA.

From the sky: flurries of flakes. On the roads: cars covered in a sheen of powder, tyre-chains inexplicably equipped (the snow does not, in my version of GTA 5 where a significant chunk of the exterior map has absconded to the phantom zone, settle). In the air: a crisp winter chill. Santa Claus is coming to town; fire a truck at him.

I can't tell you if the presence of snow on the city roads impacts car handling because, as we have established, cars in my GTA 5 no longer have handling. Nevertheless, it does change the vibe quite a lot. As someone who's spent a lot of the last month looking at GTA 5—a change is as good as a rest.

But also, it is time for a rest. I will see you the week after next, whereupon we'll probably finally convert this game into GTA 6. I can feel it.

The problem with Grand Theft Auto 5, really, is that its world lacks verisimilitude. Unlike GTA 6, which will be more real than real, a psychosis-inducing perfect recreation of reality that we will be both unable and unwilling to tear ourselves from, Los Santos in GTA 5 is just sort of… stagey. It's a big Hollywood set (of Hollywood), all outside and no inside.

I have now added the inside. I installed Open World Interiors, whose aim is to furnish various GTA 5 businesses with actual, inhabitable inside zones. Restaurants, hospitals, gyms—all these and more, so the pitch goes, unfurl beyond you as new territory to explore and conquer.

That's the pitch. In reality, stepping outside of Franklin's Beverly Hills house quickly revealed that a significant chunk of Los Santos had been inexplicably deleted. I do not know where it has gone or why it has gone there. Maybe, one day, it will return.

Some things do work, though! Navigate through the hit squads and flying cars until you find a fast-food joint, and you can now dip inside, at which point you will be confronted by a taster's plate of Los Santos freaks sat in infrangible silence while one of the game's radio stations plays, inscrutably, from somewhere.

So, all well and good—Los Santos has an inside now. Only one thing is broken (apart from the large chunks of the outside that are broken): attempting to enter a gym will send you plummeting into the fathomless void at the secret heart of the world. You will scream. The radio will continue playing. "This is the rhythm of the night," declares Corona as Franklin tumbles, screeching into the void. After falling for some time, he reappears in front of the gym's doors. Los Santos is a mysterious place.

We saw many things during Grand Theft Auto 6's weird Netflix reveal, and it's official: GTA is simmy now. The gendarmes will meticulously document your physical appearance, and escaping them will necessitate changing it up. Jason and Lucia will also, the prophets tell us, feel the effects of sleeplessness and bad diet, just like mortals.

One thing we haven't seen from official sources: cars needing petrol. That particularly sim-ish feature has only been part of contraband GTA 6 leaks. Nevertheless, I have completely internalised this mechanic into my vision of the game. If you can't trust anonymous online weirdos trying to flog you some crypto thing, who can you trust?

So, naturally, I had to incorporate a working gas mechanic into my ongoing quest to turn GTA 5 into GTA 6 or kill it by trying. I installed Fumes – Animated Persistent Fuel, whose functions are thus: "Every vanilla and online vehicle carries a real fuel tank. It empties as you drive and it is still empty when you come back to that car tomorrow.

"Refuelling is not a menu," it says, casting subtle shade on all those non-hardcore car-gassing mechanics out there. "Get out, walk to the pump, take the nozzle off it—it goes in your hand and the hose comes with you on a real physics rope." Yes. All of these things are refuelling, to me.

It works like this: on your minimap, while driving, a new meter now tracks how much petrol your car's got left in it. Run out, and your journey's at an end. You know, like how cars work.

This was difficult to test. As we've already well-established, my current installation of GTA 5 is a nightmare merry-go-round of frictionless cars and increasingly contradictory mods. To actually acquire a car, I first had to figure out how to make one stop, and how to make sure it did not get immediately detonated by the hordes of hitmen and ambient gang violence that have become the burden of my Los Santos life. It's harder than it sounds: even throwing myself beneath a car's wheels didn't really help. Yes, the driver would get out to ask if I was okay (I was not), but the car would keep going.

I eventually commandeered one, however, by teleporting (Franklin can teleport now). The mod worked! Also, numerous other mods I already had installed kept throwing errors, which is probably fine. But amid the error messages and chaos, I managed to make it to a petrol station, in order to test the mod's robust in-person refuelling mechanics.

Never mind.