Five Reasons Grand Theft Auto’s Creators Are Mad

In the almost two weeks since its release, Grand Theft Auto 5 has captured the hearts, time and imaginations of the world's gamers, shattering records and relationships around the planet as the mind-blowingly expansive realm of the greater Los Santos region opened its many spindly arms for a 'welcome home' hug from which, once engaged, there is no easy escape.

People who aren't fans struggle to see the appeal of these games, but GTA V is so very much more than just mindlessly boosting cars and murdering civilians in cold blood – although, yes, there is plenty of that going on. But the sheer scope, depth and variety of ways in which the team at Rockstar Games have outdone themselves in creating an immersive, realistic, seemingly boundless world is simply unmatched in the medium, and arguably beyond it.

So, naturally, we have to question the sanity behind some of it. Because, while you couldn't hope to convince anyone who's played it that GTA V is anything short of the pinnacle of human achievement, there's also no questioning that it could only have been programmed by crazy people.

5. Chop the Dog

In GTA V, player character Franklin, an up-and-coming crim from the ghettos of Los Santos, inherits a dog, Chop, from his burnout friend Lamar. Occasionally Chop gets brought along on missions, or you might switch to Franklin and find that he's out for a walk with Chop, and it's all very lovely and Man's Best Friend-ish but, otherwise, Chop's a fairly non-essential character. But Rockstar turned him into a new-age Tamagotchi anyway through its mini-game outside the game, Chop the Dog.

I didn't sign up for this.

Start playing Chop the Dog, available via GTA V's real-world companion app iFruit, and you are unleashing a can of responsibility that you may not be prepared for. You have to feed Chop. You have to give Chop water. You have to play with Chop. You have to pick up Chop's shit. You have to take him for walks where he fights off other dogs, rival gang members and steals women's bikinis, because I guess that's normal dog behaviour.

Granted, Chop won't actually die if you don't do any of that – I know from experience; he just lies there on the brink of death, struggling to breathe, and it is so fucking depressing – but, that aside, his unhappiness in the real-world Chop the Dog game translates to his demeanour and loyalty in GTA V, and NPC (non-player-character) sidekicks are generally awful enough without being specifically programmed to run off and not listen to you just because you didn't clean up his poop in a totally different game.

4. The torture scene

Relatively early in GTA V, there is a mission in which player character Trevor, under instruction from federal agents, is made to torture a man for information. Players pick from waterboarding, electric shocks, wrench beatings and pulling teeth before inflicting their abuse of choice upon the hapless captive. Narratively, the scene makes sense – even more so given Trevor's established nature as a genuine psychopath – but the whole scene is drawn out in excruciating detail as players have to perform control commands to ensure Trevor is dishing out just the right amount of torture – too much or too little would be pointless, after all.

Torture's a crime, but so are leather necklaces.

It might seem strange, even hypocritical, to draw a line in the sand for what constitutes “enjoyable” virtual violence or not, especially as a lifetime gamer and willing eviscerator of sprite-based faces. But, even for someone whose adolescent self spent hours running Lara Croft off cliffs in the original Tomb Raider just for the perverse satisfaction of seeing the particularly awful way her polygonal body contorted upon hitting the ground, GTA V knocks the violence up to a disturbingly intimate level, and in the process brings to the surface latent feelings of discomfort about inflicting violence on a well-rendered piece of code that I didn't even realise I had.

3. The strip club experience

Ever since video games were invented, mankind has been trying to find a way to make enticing digital renditions of the naked female form, because nothing else matters. But, even as graphics have progressed from pixels to high-definition glory, digi-bewbs remain as sad as ever – probably even more so than when they made Custer's Revenge. I say it's sadder now because, during the era of Strip Fighter 2 and Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em (those are both real games), graphics were sufficiently shitty that there was no real insinuation that they were trying to be anything other than the basest representation of female biology. But in GTA V, simulated nudity takes on another whole level of insane wish fulfilment.

The picture above is keeping it safe for work, but make no mistake – upon entering one of Los Santos' strip clubs, you can hit up a dancer for the princely sum of $40 to give you a first-person, press-A-to-flirt, hold-RT-to-touch, hey-these-boobs-look-identical-to-the-boobs-on-every-other-stripper-in-this-game lap dance. If you're lucky and you flirt with the stripper enough, maybe she'll even go home with you for some simulated boning, and it probably looks even better than GTA: San Andreas' infamous Hot Coffee mod, and we all remember how sexy that was!

Oh, right.

Really, though, in a city with so much to do – tennis, yoga, parachuting, triathlons, flight school, boat races, street races, get tattooed, get a haircut, buy some sweet new threads, go on a murder spree – it speaks to Rockstar's view of its audience that they felt the need to put in a real-world experience that they assume none of them have gone through, because anyone, male and female alike, who has touched a boob in real life would find absolutely no joy in this feature. It's just awkward and kind of sad.

2. The Mt Gordo ghost, and friends

Every game has Easter eggs these days to reward adventurous players who diverge from the beaten path, and GTA V is no exception. From the hatch from Lost at the bottom of the ocean and extraterrestrial paraphernalia strewn across the countryside to a zombie walking around Vinewood Hills casually asking for brains, Los Santos is filled to the brim with amazing little details and characters to discover – like the ghost of Jolene Cranley-Evans.

In one of the creepier Easter eggs to have popped up, Jolene's ghost can be seen (from a distance) between 11pm and midnight at the top of Mt Gordo. Upon approaching her, she disappears, but leaves behind a message scrawled in blood: JOCK.

Far from being a case of just another dead woman leaving outdated slurs about athletic people where nobody can see them, “Jock” is the nickname of her husband, John Cranley, a minor character from Vice City Stories and actor-cum-stuntman-turned-politician who apparently murdered his wife by shoving her off a very high cliff before, like most spousal abusers, he was interviewed by police and released without charge. If you want to know more about this local legend and more, you can read up all about it on the internet.

Well, not the internet. But “the internet”.

1. The internet

Yup. As if everything else they did to make GTA V as mind-boggling a game as possible, the developers threw in a working, dynamic, functional internet for their fictional world. Accessible through the player's in-game smartphone, players can surf through almost sixty-five individual websites, from medicine (himplantsenhancementsurgery.com) and online jobs (sixfiguretemps.com) to entertainment (classicvinewood.com) and social media (lifeinvader.com).

#Why

The social media side of things is where it gets really batshit – the game makers have gone to the lengths of programming status updates that refresh throughout the game, and created dedicated LifeInvader pages for at least thirty of its characters and corporate entities, as seen above. But hey, it is this kind of absurd and wonderful attention to detail, along with all the other craziness both good and bad that one is likely to find within the sprawling limits of the state of San Andreas, that makes GTA V what it is, and that is a resoundingly triumphant way to see out the current generation of consoles.

Well, except for the torture thing and incredibly sad lap dances. Those things are crazy bad any way you slice it.