I Loved Grand Theft Auto. Then It Became Something I Couldn’t Relate To.

There are certain games that don’t just occupy your hard drive; they occupy a permanent, rent-free corner of your brain. For me, one of those games was Grand Theft Auto.

Not the billion-dollar cultural phenomenon that launches with Hollywood budgets and causes internet outages. I’m talking about Grand Theft Auto when it was weird. When it was cheeky. When it was anarchic. When it felt like a bunch of slightly unhinged British developers had looked at every action movie they’d ever seen and decided to cram them all into one gloriously chaotic sandbox.

I loved Grand Theft Auto.

The original overhead-view GTA was unlike anything I’d played. You weren’t saving the world. You weren’t the chosen one. You weren’t a space marine fighting aliens or a fantasy hero rescuing princesses. You were just… some criminal idiot in a city full of other criminal idiots, causing absolute mayhem while listening to absurd radio stations and trying not to get flattened by a bus.

It was brilliant.

Then came Grand Theft Auto III, and somehow they pulled off the impossible. They took that chaos and made it three-dimensional. Liberty City felt alive. Dangerous. Funny. It wasn’t realistic, exactly, but it felt real enough that you wanted to explore every alleyway and every hidden jump.

Vice City? Arguably perfection. Neon lights, ridiculous suits, cheesy 1980s excess. It wasn’t trying to be authentic gangster culture. It was trying to be Scarface, Miami Vice, and every VHS action film you’d ever rented from the local video shop. It was stylised. It was camp. It knew exactly what it was.

Even San Andreas, despite beginning to lean heavily into gang culture, still had enough variety, absurdity and sheer ambition that I could happily lose hundreds of hours in it. It was enormous. It was ridiculous. It let you fly fighter jets into casinos. What’s not to love?

But then something changed.

Or perhaps I changed.

Somewhere along the line, Grand Theft Auto stopped feeling like a satirical playground and started feeling like an immersive experience in a culture that, frankly, I simply don’t relate to.

And before anyone starts furiously typing, no, I’m not arguing that the games are bad.

Quite the opposite.

The worlds are astonishing. The graphics are incredible. The technical achievement is undeniable. The writing is often excellent. The production values are so high they make blockbuster films look underfunded.

I can acknowledge all of that.

But dear God, the constant dialogue.

Every mission. Every journey. Every car ride. Every character call. Every radio conversation. Every cutscene. Every NPC seemingly desperate to explain their entire life story while I’m just trying to drive to a waypoint.

It never stops.

And the problem isn’t even that it’s badly written. It’s that I don’t care.

I don’t care about your crew’s internal politics. I don’t care who disrespected who. I don’t care who owes somebody money. I don’t care who needs to prove themselves to the streets. I don’t care about the twenty-minute conversation we’re having while driving to the actual mission.

I know millions of players absolutely love this stuff. That’s fine. Clearly Rockstar know exactly what they’re doing.

But every time I’m forced to listen to another extended conversation about criminal hierarchies, respect, territory, betrayal and who’s got beef with whom, I find myself yearning for the days when my biggest concern was whether I could launch a taxi into the side of a police station.

Maybe that’s the real issue.

Old GTA felt like freedom.

Modern GTA often feels like attending a very expensive, very well-written theatre production about people I have absolutely nothing in common with.

And perhaps that’s simply because I’m not the target audience anymore.

I grew up on games where story was a seasoning, not the entire meal. The joy came from experimentation. Exploration. Discovery. Doing something stupid simply because the game allowed it.

Modern open-world games, and GTA in particular, often seem terrified of silence. Terrified of letting the player simply exist in the world for five minutes without somebody calling, texting, shouting, narrating, or explaining their emotional motivations.

Sometimes I don’t want to hear another line of dialogue.

Sometimes I just want to steal a car, accidentally drive it into a canal, survive with three stars of police attention, and spend the next ten minutes making increasingly poor life choices.

That’s the Grand Theft Auto I fell in love with.

The irony is that I genuinely admire what Rockstar has created. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. The attention to detail is absurd. Their worlds are among the most impressive ever built in gaming.

I just don’t enjoy living in them anymore.

And that’s okay.

Not every game has to be for me forever.

I’ll still happily defend Grand Theft Auto as one of the most important franchises ever created. I’ll still tell anyone who’ll listen that Vice City was magic. I’ll still occasionally hear a particular radio jingle from the original games and immediately smile.

But every time someone tells me that the latest GTA is the most immersive experience ever created, I can’t help but think:

“That’s wonderful.”

Now please stop talking for five bloody minutes and let me drive the car.

I don’t want to preempt GTA6, but here’s what I’ll hope will be a DLC

Grand Theft Auto: Leave Me Alone

Features include:

• 100% less discussion about respect.
  Nobody cares. You don’t care. They don’t care. The entire concept of “street cred” has been replaced by “can I get home before the traffic gets bad?”
• All dialogue rewritten by adults over 45.
  • “Dave nicked £20 off me in 1998. Still a bit annoyed about it.”
  • “Yeah, well, life’s disappointing, isn’t it?”
  • “Can we stop for a coffee? My back’s gone.”
• Permanent weather setting: Light drizzle progressing to biblical rain by 3pm.
• The radio stations:
  • Traffic reports.
  • A man explaining mortgage rates.
  • Classic rock.
  • Silence.
• Main storyline: Somebody parks over your dropped kerb and you’re prepared to commit several crimes over the principle of it.
• Character customisation:
  • Waterproof jacket.
  • Slightly waterproof jacket.
  • “This used to fit me” jeans.
  • Reading glasses.
• The respect metre has been replaced by a “Can I Be Bothered?” metre. The lower it gets, the more powerful your character becomes.
• Gang encounters:
  

  “You disrespecting me?”

  “No mate, honestly, I just don’t give a shit.”

• Mission briefings average seven seconds.
  

  “There’s a bloke who’s been making a racket at 2am for three weeks.”

  “Say no more.”

Now THAT’S what I’d preorder for.