The Ringer-Verse - AI Angst, ‘Final Fantasy Resonance,’ and ‘GTA III’ Turns 25 | Button Mash

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

Ben and Matt James break down the good, bad, and ugly of gaming’s recent reckoning with AI-driven development, decompilation, and cloning, and assess whether it will fundamentally reshape the medium’s economic and creative model. Then they provide their impressions of the newly released ‘Final Fantasy Resonance’ and ‘Nintendo Switch Sports Resort’ and react in real time to the dissolution of storied studio Bioware. Finally, Ben sets the scene for 'GTA VI' by bringing on The Atlantic’s Jeremy Gordon to reminisce about the October 2001 release of ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ and discuss how it altered the trajectory of open-world gaming and created the ‘GTA’ juggernaut. (0:00) Intro(1:40) AI talk(34:45) 'Final Fantasy Resonance'(46:32) 'Nintendo Switch Sports Resort'(54:08) Follow-ups to last week's pod(57:41) Bioware news(1:01:49) Jeremy Gordon joins the show Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Matt James and Jeremy GordonProducer: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to by Google Pixel. Whether you're at the game, your kid's party or a wedding, you want to capture the moment, but you also want to stay present. So you should probably check out Google Pixel 11 Pro with just one tap, magic capture on Google Pixel 11 Pro. Captures both video and high quality photos, then finds the best ones. So you can get back to what's important. Ask more of your phone. Try the Google Pixel 11 Pro.

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I'm Bedlinder and Senior Editor for the Ringer and Speaking of Protagonist of Butternash. Silent protagonists on podcasts, not ideal. 25 years ago, rock stars Sam Houser described to GTA3 as Zelda means goodfellas. One button mesh, you meet good fellas every week. Perhaps me included, but also my first guest, ringer Deputy Art Lead, and overall Goodfella, Matt James.

Hi, Matt. Thank you, Ben. Happy to be here, as always. Happy to have you, as always. And we have much to cover on this episode. Speaking of Grand Theft Auto 3, I will talk about GTA 3, and it's 25th anniversary later on this episode

with guest Jeremy Gordon and occasional ringer contributor Jeremy Gordon, but also senior editor at The Atlantic and novelist. And it'll get us hyped, get us ready for GTA6 to take a stroll down memory lane as GTA3 incredibly turns 25, which certainly dates us, but nonetheless. And before we get to all of that, gosh, we have games to discuss. We have a couple of new $50 game releases that we've been playing. and we'll talk about Final Fantasy Resonance and Nintendo Switch Sports Resorts.

But before we get to that, shall we talk about the AI apocalypse as it pertains to gaming these days? Because just about two months ago, I had the excellent reporter Nicole Carpenter on this podcast to talk about game cloning. And just in that span, this has gotten out of hand. This has proliferated. Yeah, a lot has happened since then. Not that that wasn't anticipatable or that we didn't touch on it in that segment, but, boy, the pace at which all of this has proceeded back then, it's somewhat mind-blowing, exciting to some, quite concerning to others.

And this, it feels like an inflection point, which is probably an overused term, because really what isn't an inflection point, but it has just been a fire hose of news and developments. And really, a lot of this came out of the most recent models. of Claude and ChatGPT, which gained new capabilities for decompiling video games. And that's a somewhat technical term, but basically it's reverse engineering the code of a video game and being able to spit out a port more or less. And this is something that people would do for decades, but it would take years. It was an extremely painstaking, laborious process to try to untangle that code once it was

compiled, AI assistance, large language models can do it in a matter of days, if not hours. And so we have seen a wave of decompiled games hit the internet, which has manifested in all sorts of ways, whether it's ports of long-established games showing up playable on browsers in incarnations that we never could have dreamed of before, whether it's sort of postmodern mashups of various games. What would happen if you took the? this protagonist and stuck them inside this game, or you just jumbled up gameplay from this game with another game. And then, of course, you have cloning of brand new games or even concepts of games, all of which has come to a head this week with Steam Next Fest, which has again exponentially

increased the number of demos that people can play, several thousands, many of which, though, are vibe-coded and are sort of slop and have just... indicted the market in such a way that they have drowned out many other games just because it's so difficult to sift through and find the more human crafted creations. So all this is happening so fast. It is a developing story. Does it feel to you like this is actually an industry altering moment? You know, we're going to talk later on the episodes with Jeremy about how GTA3's release altered the course of the industry. But does this feel to you like a moment when we will look back and say, Ah, yes, there was gaming before AI decompiling and gaming after and nothing has ever been the same.

Or is that recency bias and overreacting to the latest development in the present? I think it's certainly the case for indie games. I think AAA games are to some degree safe from this. They have a budget and a workforce on AAA games that, you know, isn't, easily replicated by AI, you would think so, or at least. And also, maybe famous last words, yeah, smash cut to an episode two months from now where we say, remember what we said about how AAA games weren't easily replicated? I mean, there are four new God of War games.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, the GTA running in a browser now, right? And the pace of takedown notices just can't keep up with what the community, quote unquote, is outputting here. I'm looking forward to Epic Games, who has just announced that they're going all in on AI dev. I'm looking forward to them dealing with people cloning their games and releasing them.

That'll be an interesting news cycle. We'll check back into that. But yeah, I think the most devastating effects are on the indie games community where you can be a small team making a game that you've poured your heart into, And it can kind of, depending on what it is, potentially be kind of cloned and slightly renamed, not even renamed very much at all. No. And resold on the internet. And yeah, that's bad.

And I've seen a lot of people kind of saying that this is perhaps overblown. And maybe it is a little bit. and that, you know, if you're making an indie game and it's of any real value, if it's anything beyond this one simple idea fleshed out, that, you know, it could be kind of hard for AI to steal it, right? If you have, like, art that's good enough, music that's good enough, like a deep enough gameplay system that, you know, that makes it very hard to kind of clone and steal. And to a degree, I'm sure that's right.

but I'm also of the opinion that we need to defend bad art as vigorously as good art. So like just because like your game is shitty doesn't mean that it should be fair game to be cloned. Do you kind of feel the same way, Ben? Sure. And I'm also skeptical, I suppose, of the idea that because we keep redrawing that line where it's like, yes, well, AI will never be able to do this though. And sure, if you're putting some sort of slop out there, then they can sloppify the slop. And yet the goposts keep moving, I think, as the capabilities keep increasing. And so I think there is a certain sort of people who had some exposure to chat DPP in 2023 or whatever

and concluded that these limitations were so stark that AI or LLMs would never be able to do this or that and have consistently been disproven, sometimes much to my dismay. I mean, you do art. We're also recording this on the day where, like, AI has essentially found, like, terrible vulnerabilities in PHP that has been forcing large chunks of the internet

shut down until it can be fixed. Like, it's not just games. Like, AI is kind of spiraling out of control in all directions, but... Yes, right. And you make art for, the ringer. I write for the ringer. I would certainly like to think that AI will never, soulless models will never be able to replicate what we do. I am increasingly worried that that may not

be the case, or at least that much of the market will not discern the difference or care about the difference. That's the big worry. Yes. And so, of course, you can never replicate the labor, the human ingenuity, the spark of creation that goes into something that someone actually poured their heart and blood and sweat and tears into, but will the consumer on the other side care about that ultimately? I think some subset, some niche will, and certainly there's already sort of an industry springing up around this was human created to the extent that you can actually document and prove that. And people will support that, but I think also a lot of people are happy just to hoover up AI-created music or whatever that sounds vaguely like something

that they're used to, even if it is sort of a soulless regurgitation of things that already existed. And when it comes to gaming, so yes, there are almost some laughable cases like this, laughable but also lamentable. And you alluded to this earlier, but there was this game concept, not even a game that went viral this summer, needle in a haystack simulator. And it was really just a proof of concept video of, hey, you have to find the needle in a haystack. here's a huge haystack and you have to go digging through it. And it was a really cool original concept and people really responded to that.

And then people cloned it and copied it. And so needle in a haystack, not needle in a haystack simulator, but needle in a haystack comes out before the original game comes out. The original game is not even out yet. You can't play needle in a haystack simulator, but a lot of people probably won't because they can go play needle in a haystack. Now, the people who made needle in a haystack are complaining that this new clone of a clone called a game about needle in a haystack

has decompiled the code from needle in a haystack and has ripped it off, copied it out of whole cloth essentially, to put this clone out there. And so you could say, I guess, you got what was coming to you because you just copied this other person's concept. I love art then. Art is so cool. I love engaging with it.

At least they copied it in a more laborious way than the copy of a copy, I guess you could say. And look, I mean, obviously art always involves copying and imitation is this and serious form of flattery and people are always building on the building blocks of what came before and standing on the shoulders of giants and everything. The difference now is that you can do that much more quickly and frictionlessly and shamelessly. And poorly. It's true. Yes, it's true. And the quality obviously varies.

Now, the quality of any game varies very much. But it is often the case that a lot of these decompiled ports or mashups or whatever, they're not accurate. They are buggy and they are. Yes, they're half-assed. They perhaps have security vulnerabilities, right? So you don't know what you're going to get, of course, not to say that there hasn't always been shovelware in video gaming and people just trying to cash in on a concept with the least

amount of effort possible. It's just that the bar for least amount of effort has been lowered. And so the market has been so flooded and so saturated. And I think that's what worries me. And also, I guess, the decompiling aspect, because sure, there's probably from a preservation standpoint, some upsides to that maybe, right? If a game is just not accessible on a certain platform, it was never ported. Hey, now I can play this with a perfect frame rate in my browser. This is great.

This is the future. There might be some benefits to that. I do also wonder how it will disrupt the economic model of gaming because, okay, maybe currently it's not that easy to replicate, say, what Rockstar is doing with Grand Theft Auto 6? But then what if the PC port of GTA6 comes out? People decompile that, make it freely available. It's not as if piracy hasn't always been a problem for gaming or for GTA games specifically. And I'm sure there are some people are saying, yeah, you know, power to the people,

sail the high seas, gaming for everyone. But people do have to get paid to make games. And so if everything is just instantly accessible for free, maybe that sounds like some sort of, you know, Wonderland, some utopian vision, but then very quickly the monkey's paw curls because what's the justification for investing in making those games? You know, it's much like everything was free on the internet,

writing was free on the internet, wasn't that great. And then AI comes along and the ad model cradle craters and suddenly that doesn't work because we're at Google Zero and suddenly you're not getting any revenue unless you're marketing directly to people who will subscribe to your stuff. So I have no idea where we're going. I'll say the one thing that gives me a little bit of hope is that gamers are terribly picky. Now, not in all regards. Of course, you know, Roblox is one of the biggest games in the world,

and that looks like absolute garbage. So I think to some degree, gamers are willing to tolerate visual garbage. But as soon as there is like a hitch in a game or a bug or, you know, bad performance, anything like that, gamers just don't have much tolerance for that kind of crap. And they are right now used to a level of quality that is fairly high from actual game developers.

And I think a lot of these vibe-coded projects are full of just errors and glitches and bugs and issues that are just so far from being okay to like the gaming community. you can release a game and have one technical issue that will cause this slew of negative reviews on Steam right now. Like this is not a climate that is going to be super amenable to dealing with not only bad bugs, but bad bugs that don't get fixed simply because the people vibe coding these things a lot of the time don't have any idea how to fix that code that they generated. And that to me is like the big. distinguishing line in this conversation of vibe coding. You know, I'm personally pretty anti-AI in not every scenario, but certainly a lot more than I'm certainly more against it than I'll be in favor of it. But I think that if you have no idea how to code, you should stay the fuck away from

vibe coding these things. Like, go learn to code. And then, you know, like, I just. it's going to make everything worse and harder. And I know you think AI is cool, that you can make Claude do a bunch of stuff. That's great. Stay away from vibe coding games, please, for the love of God.

Yeah, it's funny, not funny, but ironic, that learned to code was the frequent refrain when writers would lose their jobs from coders. And now, of course, learning to code maybe makes you replaceable too. because it turns out that coding is the thing that AI is actually best at. Just as irrelevant now is just get esteemed in. These phrases are dead.

Yeah, which means that gaming is maybe uniquely subject to the encouragement of AI. And this year, I think, has been a watershed when it comes to just companies speaking openly about this and saying the quiet part out loud. Yes, they're becoming more and more indignant about our, yeah. lack of embracing AI in game development. Yes. And I do think, I tend to think that it is a very vocal subset of people who are really up in arms about this and that a large part of the market will just say, oh, this is a good game and it's cheap. I don't need to know or care to know how it was made exactly. I don't know whether the resistance will hold as it seems to be eroded within the industry. because, of course, it's pervasive just to use AI as a coding assistant. And this is something that you can do in a responsible and efficacious way.

And there is a conflict because, okay, if you see games as art, which of course we do, well, we're not okay with AI generating art as we generally refer to it. Right? Yeah. All that sucks. Writing, dialogue, et cetera. And yet where do you draw the line? Okay, is coding.

I mean, can't coding be regarded as an art? Now, many actual coders have embraced this and found that, no, this is good. This saves us some busy work and some boring stuff. And thus, we have more time to do actual creative work. And then there are other companies that say, oh, isn't this great, we can now lay off a lot of developers because we're just shifting to AI. It's kind of confusing because there are valid applications and there are sort of hardliners who just say, any manifestation of AI. And then you run the risk of, you know, are we falling into the trap that people have

with previous technology where any innovation is, no, we have to have some sort of Luddite revolution. And then that seems quaint after the fact when we're all used to these tools. And, you know, if I am not a math expert and I open up Excel to calculate some stuff for me, well, that saves me time and enables me to do things that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And if you open up Photoshop or whatever, right? You can apply that in a way that enables you to do things that you either wouldn't be able to do or that would take you a ton more time to do.

And so there are valid applications, but then there's also where's the line? So part of me is sympathetic to the idea of democratizing development and saying, okay, someone with a dream and a great concept for a game can now maybe make that manifest by doing some sort of directed vibe coding and just. you know, being the director while the AI is implementing the actual nuts and bolts of that game, maybe that's good. Maybe that opens it up to a vast array of game makers who otherwise would be shut out of that process. And then the other part of me thinks along the lines that you were just expressing, which is just like something should be hard to do, actually. And are we doing away with the concept of expertise and mastery?

Yeah. If you can't do it, try to do it. Get good at doing it. Learn. And then you'll be able to do it. Right. And you could say, okay, well, sure, why don't you ditch all the other? Why don't you say go draw the water from the well yourself instead of having indoor plumbing?

I mean, you could apply this to other things. It's just that when it's applied to art specifically, where the entire point of the endeavor is to have some sort of human connection and express a point of view. and then you're just abrogating that responsibility and just outsourcing that to AI, well, then what was the point all along? Yeah, it's like a tool that is enabling everyone to have like CEO brain

where you don't actually know how to do anything, but you have a grand, like, arcing idea of what something could be. And it allows you to put this concept together in a way in which you have considered none of the details whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, it's not great.

And just like what it's doing to like indie game discovery on Steam is just very, very sad to me because it's one, like, the indie game scene in the PC market is like one of the most exciting, you know, elements of all of games to me. Like finding small developers making interesting things. like more important to me than first party AAA games for the most part, typically. And it just sucks that it's becoming harder to find these gems. And it's becoming more stressful than there already was to be an indie dev in this space. Yes. And we're already seeing some developers pull back from putting concepts out there or demos or beta tests because they think, well, as soon as I publicize this or allow people to play some sliver of it,

it's going to get copied. And then by the time my games come out, I will have been beaten to market by a bunch of imitators who took shortcuts. And so now we're seeing, not that there's any shortage of legitimate games out there, if anything, there are too many for us to find time to play. But you do worry that we will just be so buried in slop that the cream of the crop will not be able to rise to the top that will just be sort of sifting through all the chaff to find the wheat. I'm probably mixing metaphors, but when the storefronts are just so overwhelmed, as are we, as consumers or as curators of those games, then how do we even find the good stuff if it's just buried under a wave of all this other stuff? And I worry to liken it to maybe the video game crash

of the 80s of 1983, part of the issue then, and there were very very, causes and factors. But part of it was just that the market was so saturated and people were trying to get in on this gaming gold rush and we're just putting shovelware out there. And it really reduced consumer confidence and people couldn't find good games and there was so much half-ass stuff out there that the market crashed. And so would we end up in a similar spot where it's as if the market crashes because there is too much supply to outstrip demand? It's not as if there no good games to play. It's that there are too many games to play that at least reach some level of goodness that people are satisfied with them or just drown out the actual good games and then

do people just turn away from the hobby altogether. I mean, I'm not a domer. I don't think that people are ever going to stop playing video games. Like, this is always going to be a vital medium in one form or another. But I do wonder and worry about the discovery aspect and just how economically viable it will be for an indie developer or really anyone at any point because the budget the cost ramps up and so will that be justified too if the entire economic model is disrupted yeah and there's already enough challenges with hardware pricing spiraling out of control and the younger generation seeming to not perceive themselves as people who play video games but instead they play Minecraft or they play Roblox, right? So the challenges keep piling up in the games industry,

unfortunately. Yeah, and Roblox is making the move now to you don't necessarily have to be in the Roblox ecosystem to play a Roblox game. You can sell that and access that as an independent product, but they're also encouraging people to use AI tools to make those things as are various other game engines. And so if you get copies of copies of copies, is it, it garbage in, garbage out. And often you learn in the doing and you do in the learning. So sure, maybe you can put in a prompt and it'll spit out an article and you can say, this represents my viewpoint because it was my concept for the article. But a lot of the thinking and the refining of the argument happens in the laborious, but also rewarding process of actually

putting your thoughts down on the page as opposed to having something do that for you. And so I think it can't help but compromise the work. And you have a, the PS5 being jailbroken in an AI-assisted way. Maybe you say that piracy has always been with us. And even though it's taking a chunk out of revenue, it's still a subset of the market because a lot of gamers are just going to buy the official product and they're going to go to the store or the storefront

and get that thing. But if they go to the storefront and they can't tell the difference between the good and the rip-off, then I just don't know if that saves you, even if they're not conscious, of pirating something, even if they're not on the dark wed or, you know, downloading a rob or something, it might have the same sort of effect. Yeah, I could see that.

Well, kind of depressing conversation. I know. I know. It's like, there are aspects of this that you think, hey, this could actually change games in a good way, you know? Maybe the next great game will take three years to make instead of seven because some of this stuff is just pre-programmed and people can focus on the actual rewarding aspects of game development and the creative aspects, but then is it a slippery slope? And that just takes over.

One silver lining, possibly, that you expressed to me when we were talking about this before we recorded is that maybe if there is so much out there that curating that supply then becomes increasingly important, maybe this is self-serving the idea that, hey, people will need podcasts hosts and writers and influencers to tell them what the good stuff is. Because they're certainly not popping up on the front page of the PlayStation store, you know? Right. Yeah, even if there have been some efforts to try to separate some of the slop from the legitimate games in storefronts, it's just, it's so hard to keep up.

And even if you have to have some AI disclaimer, well, how do you know that a company is being up front about that? Yeah. And also, if you try to clamp down on the AI, you. And if Seam, you know, is going to start really filtering, give you filtering options to really get all that stuff out of your way, then people are just going to start lying about it. Because these are, especially the people who are just in bad faith making clones of stuff.

Like, why would you be honest about your use of AI if you're being dishonest about the entire premise of your game, right? Yes, right. And, and yeah, I do, you know, I'm not a, a doomer by sort of, I guess my general temperament, I tend to be an optimistic, even-keeled sort. And so this is one of the first times when I've felt like, boy, the rubber is meeting the road here, really. And this could be a time when we look back in a year or two and think, oh, there was a before and after.

And everything is different now. Everything is vibes now. Everything is vibes. Decompiling vibes. There aren't enough people who are vibe coding, who are old enough to. remember what happens when you Xerox, a Xerox, and Xerox that. People don't even know what I'm talking about, and that's fine. Yeah, yeah. And the vibes are bad in many cases. And while I'd love your optimistic spin on, hey, people will need the media taste makers more than ever. That doesn't seem to

be reflected, first of all, in games media, which just shrinks by the year. I did read at Axios that, and I quote, mentions of taste on Pinterest, Spotify, and Etsy earnings calls jumped from two in Q1, 2022 to 22 in Q2, 2026 without a trust layer to vet information that machines retrieve and analyze. The internet risks becoming a breeding ground for content that's useless to humans. That's the other thing, I guess, is the idea of dead internet and also just many of the articles, the content that the LLMs are trained on are themselves the output of LLLLLLNs. And so it's a garbage in, garbage out.

The quality just gradually reduces, and maybe that will happen in games as well. And, you know, not everyone is a bad faith actor who is looking to just capitalize and have quick cash-ins. There are many people, I think, who do see some exciting potential here. And it's not as if there aren't intriguing mashups, right? Like a lot of these concepts of what's put this game in that game. And look, it's Mario and Eldon Ring. Yeah, like, you know, some of that, it's a very niche thing. It is.

Yeah. And it's always existed, too. It just, it took more human labor and grunt work to make those things happen. And part of it is just, okay, this is kind of a funny video. It's not something I would actually want to play, whether because it doesn't function or because, well, it's totally superficial. And it's not designed in any real authorial intent kind of fashion. It's just a weird, dumb idea sometimes. It feels like a child, like, mashing together their Batman.

and Ninja Turtles action figures. Yes. Like, those don't belong together. I don't know why you're doing that. That's okay. And yet sometimes. It's not really a threat to intellectual property oftentimes. But what is Super Smash Brothers, if not, hey, let's smash together our

Well, let's smash all of our Nintendo action figures together. Yes, it's true. Yes, maybe. And of course, that's designed in a way. In fact, Sakurai, the creator of Super Smash Brothers, and theuteur of that franchise was warning about you still need originality, even as we are just buried under globs of AI, right? But some of these ideas are actually kind of cool and clever.

And so part of me, you know, I've seen Whiplash where people will say, oh, look at this cool project. And then they will learn that it was vibe coded. And they will say, oh, actually, I condemn this because it was vibe coded. And it's like, well, five minutes ago you thought it was cool, right? And it was something that didn't exist. before it was vibe-coded. And so is it inherently bad because it came to be in that fashion if it works,

if it's cool and clever? I don't know. I think there are hardliners who will say yes, and we can't give an inch. It's such a nuanced conversation. It is, right? And the frustrating thing about it to me is that I feel like, I don't know, 80 to 90% of the time when I'm debating some sort of vibe-coding use, I hate it. and I think it's bad.

But there is that annoying 10 to 20% where I can see an ethical and moral justification for the way that something is being used in its aims. And I get so frustrated when I am not mad at an AI vibe-coded endeavor. Yes. I don't know. Yes.

And it's, for many people, it's just inherently tainted and compromised and it's fruit of the poison tree or poisonous tree because just ethically speaking, maybe there's no ethical consumption under LLMs, right, because of environmental concerns, because of so much of this is based on plagiarism, right? That even if it spits out something that can be kind of creative in a directed way, well, maybe it's just inherently you can't use it and keep your hands clean because of the provenance of this stuff. So it's really hard to navigate and it's all really evolving and developing.

And there was an Xbox manager who went on a little rant this week and said, look, everyone's doing this. It's pervasive in the industry. That's what no one will tell you. And they will tell us. I mean, it's pretty out there. It's not really subtext anymore. And in fact, Asha Sharma and Xbox, they've just started up a division,

which basically is based on this kind of, you know, more or less reading between the lines. They didn't use the words AI or the term. AI in the language, but you could see that they were trying to avoid the backlash that can prop up when you use those terms. But it was very much that. It's, hey, everyone is doing this decompiling stuff. Looks kind of cool. Especially because Asha Sharma has that AI background and of course, she intentionally distanced herself from when becoming the Xbox head. Yes. So maybe we can revisit all of this on our year end episode and future episodes because it's certainly not going to episode. If we're all still here and the internet exists and we're not. Yes. And these concerns are not

unique to video games either, right? I mean, people have larger concerns about AI, namely, will it destroy us all, you know, including many of the people who are purveying these tools? And so that's a larger overriding concern. And this is a concern for all sorts of software, not just video games, right? It's just this is our little corner. And I often think that the way these things are being implemented and discussed in gaming, kind of a leading indicator for the way that it will soon pervade everything. So this is just, it's growing at leaps and bounds, and for better and worse, and in many ways worse.

Mostly worse. We will just, yeah, we will hope that whatever happened to the hobby we love, we will hope that it survives. Shall we whistle past the graveyard, the possible graveyard here, and talk about a couple of new games quickly to $50. Oh yes, for the love of God, please, yes. Games, yes, which as far as we know are no vibes involved. Yes, although for all we know, there was some sort of coding assisting happening here, but

man, I'm so upset that the word vibe is being taken from us. Yeah. To throw a negative connotation on it. Yeah, the term vibe was just we were using vibe for everything. So maybe this will rein in the usage a little bit in some. context. But we are almost six months away from Final Fantasy 7 revelation, but there is no need to wait for a new Final Fantasy if you can't because Final Fantasy resonance is out now. And we've been playing it. And, you know, this is, this is a very different sort of Final Fantasy from Final Fantasy

seven, obviously. And yet a worthy and valid one as well. So this is out now. And this is out now. for switch, switch to PS5, Windows, Xbox, everything, essentially. And this is a gotcha game glow up, really. This is an HD-2D adaptation of a 2015 mobile game called Final Fantasy Brave Xpius. And this was a free-to-play game with all of the downsides that typically come with free-to-play mobile micro-transaction-lavin games. and they have repurposed that, much like I guess Octopath Traveler Zero did last year,

as a full-fledged fan of fantasy game, which is sort of a throwback, retro, no frills, Final Fantasy, in a sense. And I guess you can maybe kind of tell that this had its origins in a mobile game, but not necessarily because it has really been rebuilt. I don't think I would have been able to tell if I might not have known.

No, yeah, prior knowledge. It is the first HD-2D Final Fantasy game, but that's all the rage right now, including with other Squar Enix RPG franchises. So you have finished this game, right? I have not, actually. I am 42 hours in. And you've probably come close then, I guess.

I have been doing every side quest. There are essentially like six main baddies in the game, and I'm through four of those six and have done every bit of side content possible before advancing the story anymore because I absolutely love this game

and I am not about to rush through this because I'm enjoying it so much. Yeah, it is maybe it'll appeal to a certain generation of Final Fantasy gamers or RPG gamers because it is somewhat retro in its design.

Definitely. And yes, you have the, not the Sinister Six, but the Swarden Six, and there are various magic crystals. And so at Bedrock, it's a pretty paint-by-numbers set up for an old-school RPG.

You've played more of it than I have, though I've sunk a fair amount of time into it. So if you were thinking, oh, this originated as a free-to-play mobile game, like maybe this will be a budget, bite-sized experience. No, not really. Nope.

Maybe compared to file things. Fantasy 7, the re-envisioning, but not compared to most games, this is going to take you some serious time. But it is a throwback in the sense that it's a turn-based RPG with an overworld and with kind of a traditional Final Fantasy story. And it's extremely turn-based. I mean, it's not the more action-adventure hybrids of recent Final Fantasy's. It's not even like an active time battle kind of turn-based system. It is very much you're taking turns and you're attacking and you have magic and you're targeting the weaknesses. And you're clicking through that menu to select your spells and the attacks.

Yeah. Which it was kind of nice just to say, oh, you know what? Yeah, this is how it used to be. We got them. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, you know, I mean, maybe it would appeal to people as nostalgia bait, but it's really

well done. And also the pixel art style is glorious. It is. I think that's one of the headlines. It's just that I think that this is one of the best looking and sounding, you know, of those HD-2D games that we've ever seen. It is just gorgeous. And the soundtrack is incredible. And that's just kind of like the starting point to talk about this game, I think. I don't think you have to have a background in Final Fantasy or.

turn-based RPGs to get into this. I think it might be like a pretty good entry point for people into trying this. I know we've had a good amount of Dragon Quest remakes lately, one in two, three, seven reimagined. And those are also all fairly good jumping in points for this kind of genre. But I do feel like, I do feel like those Dragon Quest games sometimes fail to hook people because of the relative simplicity of the combat systems in those games. And where I think Final Fantasy Resonance really excels and what I keep talking about with people who like the genre

is how engaging this combat system is, how just it feels like a Final Fantasy combat system, and it has depth to it without being overwhelming. and having that complexity inside a fairly traditional simple framework of a Final Fantasy game, of an RPG is just this really excellent pairing. And it feels a lot like a Final Fantasy game. It unmistakably feels like a Final Fantasy game to me. But it also has that kind of breezy, relaxing nature that Dragon Quest games have.

And I think that kind of mixture is, is really fantastic to me and refreshing. So many Final Fantasy's take themselves so seriously. And this does to a degree, but there is just an ease to this game. And not in difficulty, but in feel and tone that I just, I'm really connecting with. Yeah, it is pretty low friction.

I think it does a good job of introducing you to the system, which is pretty traditional. I enjoy the visions, which are sort of the summons, which are drawn from Final Fantasy history, which I guess is gimmicky, but it's a good gimmick, you know? It's a good gimmick. It is. Subic heroes from everything up to Final Fantasy 15. And it's jarring at times because you have this HD, 2D pixel art style.

16 is in there, actually. That's right. Yeah. And then you're bringing in these fully rendered 3D cutscenes and everything, which I watch once and then skip. But I still enjoyed that, though. It'll just walk down memory lane of Final Fantasy history.

And the score is excellent, which you expect from a Final Fantasy. And much of that is adapted from XVAS, which I didn't play because mobile got a game. But it sounds great. Might as well have been a card game to you. Yeah, then you might have played it. But yeah, I mean, the music is great

and incredibly catchy. And I didn't get sick. of the battle music, even though there are a lot of battles. So there are a lot of random encounters, but they're pretty quick. And a lot of the just, you know, some of the laborious stuff in old school games, like, you can save very liberally. You can fast travel very fast. Yeah, it's just, yeah, getting from place to place.

The quality of life stuff is definitely there. Exactly. Yes. I guess my main, I mean, my main complaint is just the, the, the quality of the writing and the story. And from what I understand, maybe it gets good late. Yes. I would say it's fine so far.

I think it sets itself up as a very by the numbers experience from a story perspective. And I think that, you know, where I am in the game, you know, more than halfway through, it is definitely opened up into something more interesting than what it first appears to be. Now that said, I think, you know, there's a lot of voice acting in this game and I've found most of it to be pretty good. I think that some of the dialogue can be a little cringy here and there. Just, yes. But, you know, to a degree, like, that's the genre. But yeah, it's kind of a hit or misexperience on the dialogue in this story. There's nothing in here that is getting in the way of my enjoyment of the game. But there are perhaps not a tremendous number of moments that have,

you know, grabbed me in any meaningful way. There have been some. Yeah, there is a more modern tone to it, less freely language, which I appreciate sometimes, although sometimes it seems discordant to see that in Final Fantasy. It's just like, you know, I guess this isn't new for the franchise, but just like trying to track down an airship engineer who's named Scott, you know, and things like that. And I love a game with airships, by the way, anything that reminds me of Skies of Arcadia is cool with me.

And I also enjoy, there's a lot of very chatty battle banter, but it's actually kind of smart. Yeah, some of it's actually kind of clever. Yeah, it's responsive to what you do. And I like that I feel like I'm part of the group and they're responding to what I'm actually doing and how the battle is developing. And there are a few of those barks that are that are kind of like very self-aware of the genre and making little jokes about the genre. The protagonist is named Laswell. And I am playing the new Call of Duty campaign, Modern Warfare 4, which we will talk about next week.

And one of the characters in Call of Duty is named Laswell. So I'm just going back and forth between Laswell and Laswell and Control Resonant and Final Fantasy resonance and it's hard to keep it all straight. But AI cloning. This is worth flop, man. I'm sure of it. Right. This is worth checking out. And it will certainly tide you over, not that there's any shortage of good games to play, but until the headliner Final Fantasy comes out next April.

This is more than just a stopgap. It definitely is. And I really keep coming. didn't expect to be so taken by the combat system in this game, but just the way it works, how each of your four people in your party, you equip a vision to those Final Fantasy characters from other games, and you level up your character who has their own unique skills and that vision, who has their own unique skills, and you're constantly kind of encouraged to level that vision up with that character fully.

and then swap in a new vision and you can retain some of the old vision's skills so you can really create your own build for each of the four people in your party and there are many party members and it just constantly has you tinkering and evolving

and it keeps it from being stagnant you're not going to just pick up your same character and use the same spells throughout the whole game it really drives an evolving experience And I absolutely love that. Yes. And you can play it in short bursts. And it is a good mobile game if you play it on a mobile platform now in its current incarnation.

Good Switch game. I played it on PS5, but it would make a good Switch game. Speaking of Switch games, let me tell you briefly about a new one. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, which arrives 20 years after Wii Sports. And so as We Sports Resort was to We Sports, Switch, Switch. sports resort is to switch sports. And this is what you would expect, more or less. You're going to a luxurious island resort where you can engage in various sporting activities. Yes. And, you know, you can use your joycon and you can do motion-track athletic, quote-unquote, activities and mini-games.

And there's also sort of a social aspect to it. And there's a single-player component. You You can play online. You can play local multiplayer. That's where the meat of the thing is. But there's a lot of free roaming and exploration of the island, which you can do on a skateboard, or you can do power cruising, which is the, I guess, legal way to say on a jet ski or in an airplane. And you can collect things and you can explore the island. Speaking of vibing, you can just kind of vibe out and low stress and fly around or skate around. But the meat and potatoes. the core, the 12 games that are packaged in here. I guess that's including some of the ways to navigate the world.

But it's a pretty expensive package as these games go. And as usual, it's a mixed bag. And it's a bit hit or miss in terms of what actually translates well to motion controls. And it's done as well as ever, if not better. But I just find some of the games kind of a, I tried this one. and I think I'm good, you know, or some of them there's a lot of overlap, right? Because we have archery, boxing, table tennis, non-table tennis, volleyball, bowling, basketball, golf, thumb wrestling.

Yeah. Skateboarding, power cruising, quote unquote, and pilot wings, basically, of prop plane and some other odds and ends, jump rope warm up, right? And so I do kind of wish that this would be like the Super Smash Brothers. ultimate of this series and just every sport that they've ever implemented would be in this thing because something like fencing or baseball or badminton or soccer or disc golf have fallen by the wayside. And maybe they just need to save something for the DLC. And ultimately they will be packaged in here. But I'd like it if they gave you even more. But, you know, there's plenty of bang for

your buck, I guess, at 50 bucks. Now, it's never going to be as impactful as we sports was just because as I'm about to talk about GTA3. It's like the first time you do something that expands your horizons. Yeah. And also, Wii Sports was packaged with the Wii for free, which is a different proposition than spending 50 bucks on this thing. And I would say that basketball was kind of a, all right, I tried it, I'm good. Or even volleyball. And table tennis and tennis, you know, there's a lot of overlap there.

there's some tried and true time tested. You know, you're always going to have boxing and bowling. Bowling's always going to be fun. Golf is going to be what golf has been before. The highlight for me is archery. Archery is really cool, which is one of the few activities that takes to JoyCon, which, yeah, when I played this first at a Nintendo event for an hour or so, they had, you know, as many JoyCon as you wanted.

JoyCon, plural. The plural of JoyCon is also JoyCon. I guess there's some debate about this, but two JoyCon costs like 90 bucks, by the way. And I don't have, I just have the two that came with the system because I'm mostly a pro-controller man. And so I don't know that I'm going to spring for 90 bucks for an extra. But most of these, you're only using one side at a time. And so you can just take turns or pass it around or share. But some of these do require two like archery.

but archery, I think, is actually the best because you're kind of, you know, pulling back the bow, right, and releasing it. And there are various challenges and mini games in different distances and you have to aim for this. And it becomes like mini golf meets archery. And that's actually really fun. And it feels pretty precise. It maps onto the activity well, whereas some lack the precision that I would desire. I mean, table tennis is probably one of the most fun activities here. And yet it never quite satisfies my desire for precision, much like Mario Tennis, for instance, because you have some control, but not perfect control. It's like if I just want to hit a forehand to the same side of the table, you can't do that really. Like you have to hit across the table, even if you really try to angle the paddle that way. And so it does tie your hands in a way that I find just doesn't fully simulate the experience. Did you get a chance to play a bunch of this, you know, with any of your Your family members? Yes.

And that's the core appeal here. This is never going to be a game that I sink a ton of time. You're not sitting in a dark room playing this. It's sort of designed to be like the game you throw on when, you know, your, your distant family or friends show up. It's a party game. It's good with a group. It's good for younger people or older people who are charmed by the controls. My initial plan was to have my five-year-old daughter Sloan, make her.

button mash debut and talk about our experience with this game, but she actually didn't really take to it that well. She mostly enjoyed just flying around and crashing in the plane. That's okay. I know she's high for GTA 6, so we'll get her on. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty quickly, can we go back to playing some, some Mario game or another? So it didn't grab her. Maybe she was just a tad too young for it. Yeah, I don't know. And, you know, some of it's like skateboarding is like drag X drives. but a mode in Switch Sports Resort. And we've seen this in basketball, right? I mean, we've seen that sort of thing too.

It just doesn't always map on perfectly. But yes, if you want kind of casual fun, someone's coming over, and you want to just hand off the controllers and have a good time for a while, this remains a very good game for that sort of activity and that setting and context. So I would give it a qualified recommendation. It doesn't really reinvent the wheel or the joycon, but if you've played a game like this before and you're wondering, does it hold up?

Is it the same sort of experience, but maybe more and a little bit prettier? Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what it is. Is there a me creator in this? Yes, there is a lot of customization. So if you care about decking out your character and making them kind of look like you and all, that's very much here.

And you, you know, unlock in-game currency and you can trick yourself out and collect all sorts of stuff, which I tend to care a little less about, but my daughter did enjoy creating virtual Sloan in Switch Sports Resort. So many more choices, I think, on that side of thing. So there is depth, if that's the kind of thing that grabs you. But, you know, more of the same, I suppose, which is both good and bad. But we're checking out if this is up your alley.

If you've never played one or if you have played one and it was to your liking and you want the new one, that's what you're going to get. briefly here at the end. Last week, we did a little spooky game, spooky season. Here are our recommendations for what you might want to play around Halloween, and we had a whole laundry list of them. One we meant to mention, but I think didn't, is Silver Pines. And you at least played the demo of this one. This came out earlier this month.

So you want to give a quick shout out to the one that got away during that segment? It's also, I suppose, survival horror, Metroidvania. so it would have been especially fitting for our Metroidvania draft episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, it's a game that should be right up my alley. And I did play the demo this a few months ago, and I'm eager to find some time in the near future, maybe, to play this game along with several others.

But the vibes are fantastic vibes. Man. Vives are great in this game. It's got kind of a lynchian survival horror feel to it. The art style has this really appealing noirish kind of look to it at times. And yeah, you're kind of side scrolling through this game world. I did find the combat to be a little bit, clunky and I think to some degree that might be a bit intentional because in sort of a silent

hill approach they don't really want you to be engaging in combat with everything right they they kind of want you seemingly to to pick and choose your battles wisely um but even still I did I did find those engagements to be kind of clunky and and and frustrating and now again this is a demo from months ago so I'm eager to get my hands on the final thing see how that combat evolves. But everything about like the, the layout of the town and the vibes and the storytelling and the nostalgia and and clear, you know, loves that this has for other previous games in the genre. It's all, it's all there. So I am definitely eager to to get this one and sit down with it and give it the time it seems to deserve. And one more follow up to last

week when we did our Metroidvania draft, I invited people to write in to complain about the games that we missed. And the most common snub that was cited was a game called The Messenger. The Messenger. I will read one email, yeah, sent to RingiverseGaming at gmail.com by listener Derek W. Who says the genre draft concept was super fun to listen to, and I hope you do more in the future. But I can't believe no one said the messenger, even as an honorable mention. We should have said it as an honorable mention. I agree.

We should have. Yes, we should. Also, Carion. Carian. I don't know how you pronounce. C-A-R-R-I-O-N, where you're just a meat sludge kind of alien thing. Right. It's a good one, too.

Yeah. Derek says about the messenger, the way it starts off as a linear Ninja Guideon type game, only to turn into a full-blown Metroidvania with time traveling between 8-bit and 16-bit eras with seamless graphical musical transitions. With so memorable, fun, and well-executed would have been one of my top picks, so I couldn't stand idly by as you blatantly disrespected it without writing in. Thank you, Derek. We welcome that and will not shoot the messenger. But, um, okay. Last thing, breaking news and maybe heartbreaking, though not entirely surprising

news, Bioware is no more. And I guess, yeah, yeah, this is, I guess a fitting transition from our talk about the industry's evolution or devolution and now going into nostalgia territory with GTA 3, but electronic arts, now Saudi-owned, of course, has announced that BioWare will be shut down, that roughly 400 employees will be laid off, that they are canceling the next game in the beleaguered Mass Effect series. Obviously, the writing has been on the wall for some time. There has already been a creative exodus at BioWare, many of the people who made the great BioWare games of old that you recall have already departed. And yet it's still sad to see this come to an end.

And whether it was BioWare sometimes shooting itself in the foot or EA, I think, hamstringing Byaware, you could say that EA killed BioWare long before it officially killed BioWare. It's still really sad to see just because of everything BioWare contributed to gaming just from Baldur's Gate to Cotor to Mass Effect to Dragon Age and we could go on. You know, the heyday of BioWare is long behind us. But nonetheless, I was rooting for it to exist in some form and maybe have some kind of come back at some point. And well, that's not happening.

Yeah, the whole saga with Dragon Age Vale Guard was really problematic. That game was very expensive. it did not hit in the way that they wanted it to. And in development, that game was changed around severely and just didn't hit for most people when it came out, certainly not to the financial degree that they needed. And yeah, this is not surprising, unfortunately.

Yep. But it is sad. Only fuels concerns, of course, about what Saudi owned yet. will look like and are they just going to be consolidating and downsizing and laying off and will it continue to be an LGBTQ friendly developer and publisher and what does this mean? You know, again, we knew that there would be layoffs. There always is with some extremely expensive debt financed acquisition like this.

But boy, to see BioWare bite the dust like this. It's rough. It's rough, especially for gamers of a certain age who remember when BioWare basically couldn't miss. So pour one out, RIP for BioWare, and maybe we can do a longer and more in-depth Viking funeral for a storied studio at some point. And there will be many tributes, of course, and hopefully the people there will be able to latch on somewhere. but everything is so unsettled and topsy-turvy these days that you just never know who will the next bioware be, if anyone. Just an uplifting episode again.

Well, you know what? Look, we shouted out a couple of pretty good games. And now at least I will indulge and reminisce about another great one that changed everything about the industry and the reverberations are still being felt. today. And so we will recall GTA 3. We will get you ready for GTA 6. And I suppose we will segue from one Claude to another, from the LLM to the silent protagonist of GTA, who was later revealed to be named Claude. Thank you, Matt. And I will be back in just a moment with Jeremy Goy. Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same

low, no frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC. Express pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no frills.ca. At precisely 823 p.m. Roger Kwan was not waiting for a table outside his favorite restaurant with his girlfriend, so a passing sports coupe did not splash slush all over her, making her question why she was dating him. And a second car did not splash her again, confirming her belief. All because Roger skipped it, stayed in, and with the skip app ordered the best

chicken tika masala she'd ever had. Confirming Roger might just be. The one. Way to go, Raj. Skip to the good part. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why their system lets you take payments. Track sales, handle inventory, manage staff, send invoices, and keep up with finances all in one place. Apply through orders with zero mistakes. Get the data you need and keep everything working together. So you're ready for whatever's next. Learn more about their customizable plans at squareup.com.

senior editor, namely me is not enough. Well, you call on another, namely my next guest, Jeremy Gordon, senior editor and writer for the Atlantic and author of the novel, Sea Friendship. Jeremy, welcome. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for taking some time away from polishing off your next novel to reminisce about an old video game. I hope it's going well, and maybe this podcast will help. You never know what a break from the writing will unlock. But we are less than a month. month away from GTA 6 after our epic weight. And we are also not even days away now from the 25th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3. And also, as it happens, the fifth anniversary of a package we published at the Ringer on the 20th anniversary of GTA 3, because that's how time works. And the centerpiece of that

package was a reported feature by you about that game and the seismic impact it made on not only you, but also the industry at large. And I've been realizing as GTA 6 gets closer that part of my excitement for this game in this series is still a residual reaction to my excitement about GTA 3, because even though this game is 25 years old, we were old enough to play and appreciate it at the time, which unfortunately dates us, I suppose. But the upside of that is that we can recall what it was like to play in the moment. And I think your piece captured that well. It was pretty mind-blowing.

Yeah, it's, you know, I mentioned this in the piece, but it's rare that I have, like, perfect memories of the first place where I played a game from my childhood. But with that one, it really is kind of, like, you know, quasi-formed at least as this very distinct, you know, sacred affair, almost. I mean, there was nothing like it at the time. I mean, in some regards, you're sort of trying to chase that feeling as an adult gamer, well, knowing that it is yet impossible.

Yes, and obviously part of that is that we were 13, 15, whatever we each were at that time. And so there is a little bit of looking back and remembering everything nostalgically during that period. And I certainly have warm memories of other games that probably were not quite so great, just because of the period when I or we happened to play them. and yet you sort of sought out people who were actual adults and even working in the industry at the time to get their reactions just to kind of calibrate and make sure that this wasn't just us and our impressionable minds being blown away. I mean, this was just a shot across the bow of an entire industry. Yeah, it was very interesting to talk to some of the developers who were making games at the time and recognizing and hearing in their own words the recognition that this was, you know, an announcement to the rest of the industry that, you know, things had changed.

And I think as one person put it, it very quickly became like a new standard very, very quickly, where if your game just didn't have at least some of these features that GTA3 did, you were just outdated and left in the past. Yeah. I was reading an interview or watching one with the actor Dominic Monaghan who talked about GTA3 a couple of years ago, and he was reminiscing about when he first played it and how mind-blowing it was for him. Evidently, he was playing it with Elijah Wood, which I love just the thought of the guy who played Mary from Fellowship a few months before that movie opened, sitting with Frodo and playing GTA3 and being as blown away by it as we were.

And he talked about how it just was sort of a turnaround or a turning point for him where he didn't realize that games. could do this or that they would ever do this. And so there is sort of a before and after GTA 3 and nothing was really ever the same, both for better and worse. And it does feel to me that, yes, when I play a modern GTA game, and arguably every subsequent mainline GTA game, well, certainly has been bigger and in some respects better. And if you go back to play GTA 3 now, it is undoubtedly dated in a lot of respects. And yet, you never forget your first time, I guess. And so it's really hard to replicate the impact of that.

And so there might be some part of me, even when I play GTA6, and I'm marveling at the technology on display, my inner teen is still pining for what it felt like to be in Liberty City for the first time. Yeah, you know, I think that feeling was really encountering that initial sense of possibility of, oh, these invisible walls are broken down, oh, you can blow up this car or, you know, fly that plane, all of which seems very, you know, as I say it out loud, it really doesn't seem that mind-blowing. I mean, it's like being someone, you know, it's like hearing someone describe, like the first time that you could like hear a, you know, a distorted

guitar where it's like, okay, yeah, this is pretty commonplace. Like we, everyone is playing with an electric guitar. But, you know, games for the longest time were bounded by. they're technological limitations, whether it was the graphics or just what you could, what you could do in them literally. And to me, at least, and clearly to many other people, this is the first time that a lot of these standards, these expectations for, you know, the inherent limitations of a game had just suddenly been removed. Even as now when you go back and you play GTA3, it's a lot, I mean, Janky is like too strong

of a word, but, you know, there's not that many cars in the game. You know, like the shooting is kind of bad. There's not a map. Like, it really plays pretty basically compared to, you know, what they were doing just even a few years later. And yet, you know, just because it was that first experience of total newness, you know, it just didn't feel that way at the time. Yeah. And it's funny when some of the viral videos of GTA6 leaked and officially sanctioned of Jason just going down the beach. and it's so incredibly well populated with every type of NPC you can imagine.

And then you remember being on the beach in GTA3, where it was just this vast expanse, basically a ghost town, right? You would walk around Liberty City sometimes and tumble weeds would be blowing by because it just, it was not nearly, you know, there would be, I guess, newspapers, pieces of trash on the ground, but people weren't really walking by. The pedestrian traffic was not nearly what we're accustomed to now, and there were large areas of that game that were just essentially empty,

and yet it was so impressive that you could just go to them. That was enough for us, I guess, in the moment. It was early enough in the 3D era that we were more easily impressed. Yeah, and to your point about your expectations for the new game being somewhat conditioned by this. To me, Rockstar has sort of maintained the reputation as the kind of standard bearer of expansiveness. You know, the idea that you,

every time you pick up one of their games, there's going to be more to do, and it's going to be more detailed, and it's going to be more realistic than anything else, which is funny to consider, given that. You know, the GTA games are not exactly based in the real world. They're very melodramatic and outlanders, these big cartoonish characters.

You know, you, they, some of them have these ragdoll physics. And, obviously, you know, no one can just walk around with like the shotgun and a rocket launcher in their pocket and they deploy them maximally on turn or, you know, steal endless numbers of tanks and taxis or wherever without getting put in military prison for the rest of the lives. But at the same time, you know, there, when you compare it to their, any other studio and, you know, I'm not, I don't keep super close tabs on the cutting edge ways in which other, every studio is kind of pushing their own product forward. But just by nature, becoming, being so big and having so much money and having the fort latitude to, having the space to take their time with something.

It's hard for me to think of a time and wish, like, Rockstar hasn't, you know, lived up to that expectation. I mean, GTA4, great game. GTA5, great game. Red Dead Red Dead Redemption. too. And not my favorite, obviously, but people obviously love it. And the, the immersiveness is probably has transferred over to GTA6 of anything. Because I never really thought to myself that GTA was a game which, you know, everything had to be, you know, maintain some fidelity to the real world. But there was a, you know, that concept of putting everything on the table,

I do think was there and sort of paired now with the Red Dead Redemption to, like, extremely extreme realism, I feel, has created this kind of unique set of expectations where not only you're going to be able to do more than ever, but it's going to be more grounded than ever. And I think it's not lost on me that the tone of the game seems a bit more realistic than some of the more explicit parodies and satires of prior installations. Yeah, I was thinking about that because in the so-called 3D era of GTA, obviously we're still in a 3D era, but people distinguish that from the current HD era and their different timelines and characters and everything. But the, the PS2 era protagonists, and of course, I guess the original

GTA 1 and 2 games, which were just a little less popular, but had sort of the same ethos. The PS2 protagonists became kingpins. That was what the game was, right? And Claude, of course, whose name we didn't even know at the time was just a cipher. But the idea was you're climbing the ranks. You're becoming a big wig, basically. That was the trajectory in all those games, whereas the post-PS2 protagonists are often trying to escape their criminal pasts and with varying degrees of success, obviously.

But of course, that's sort of a smokescreen for the fact that these games are still, to some extent, crime simuling. as they were originally designed to be. But originally they really leaned into that and embraced that and even glorified that. And it was just about, hey, how good a criminal can you be? Whereas now, and maybe it's the maturation of the franchise, maybe it's the moral panic backlash to the early games. Maybe it's just that gamers are getting older and long for a little more complexity in the

storytelling. There's always a little bit of, yes, we're doing bad things, but we are conflicted about. it, right? Nico is trying to escape his criminal past. This is extending to Jason and Lucia, where it seems like, ah, a lot of things have gone wrong for them, and they're trying to stay on the straight and arrow, and I thought I was out, and they pulled me back in. And there is an inherent tension there, right? Because ultimately, the gameplay of GTA is still largely about creating chaos and mayhem. And that doesn't always gel as well with the story they're trying to tell, whereas GTA 3 wasn't trying to tell any sort of sophisticated story,

and Claude never really got in the way of the players expressing their desires in the game. Yeah, you know, there's a phrase in the fanviction community called Head Canon, where he pushes the word head and the word canon together, which essentially refers to your, you know, your experience as the reader or fans, kind of making, feeling in the backstory in your head and telling yourself, okay, these two characters have a secret relationship along these lines or like the backstreet, you know, the drama, the context for this thing that happens in the story is actually because of this and that. And, you know, obviously sometimes that can lead to just a flagrant misreading.

But with a game like GTA 3, you know, I mean, a lot of it is, or even the modern GTAs, you fill in the blanks yourself a little bit. You are kind of allowed to play as you want to play and sort of resolve the contradictions because of your own your own attitude. I mean, it's funny because, you know, in a game like QTA4, you're playing this very soulful, you know, in my memory, it's been a while since I played it, but he's this soulful, conscientious, like, immigrant who's trying to make a life for himself in America. And at the same time, you can just, you know, pull out a sniper rifle and go to tower and become, do your version of, like, the Texas, like, school, you know, the clock tower,

like shooting and just go crazy. but at the same you know and is that tension ever remarked upon in the game? Absolutely not but it to some degree to me that's part of the franchise's like accessibility is the it's lack of judgment

for any committed path you know you are able to kind of mercilessly toggle between modes without being made to feel bad for it you know it's not one of these games in which you have a morality meter in which every time you kill a stranger you know your morality meter goes

into the red or even in red dead. The GTA 6 seemingly is to some extent but we'll find out how well integrated that actually is. Yeah, I mean, or even a game like Red Dead where you you're wanted and you have to like escape

the, you know, the bounty system is a little harder to overcome than just driving around and waiting for your star rating to drop. But at the same time, you know, it probably speaks to why these games are so popular because they don't trap you into any sort of path. It's very difficult to bottom out entirely

in these games, you know, like to find yourself in a position where you've just made too many of the bad choices, you know? I mean, I really enjoyed playing Baldur's Gate 3 a couple years ago, but to be honest, at some point I gave up because I just kind of lost track of like all of the different things that were crisscrossing and all the like interlocking systems and like allegiances and whatnot that I had like gotten myself into and you know I mean frankly I was like I don't care I'm I'm gonna I got a job I got away I got stuff to like pay attention to I can't just be like tracking my like reputation in this like fantasy world for too long and GTA is sort of I mean in in my memory at least like all of the ones I've continued to play to remain both like immersive

but brilliantly accessible you can kind of just like dip in for a little bit but then you can't get lost for hours as well. Yeah, I guess to trot out another well-worn term ludonarrative dissonance, which everyone brought to high-minded video game conversations some time ago, the idea that there is the tension between the gameplay and the story. And I know that with GTA, maybe it comes across as, you know, I read Playboy for the articles. I play GTA for the story, for the plot.

But I do, at least to some extent. And one thing you noted in your piece is that GTA3 really doesn't push you toward any type of progression through that game. It's very hands off in terms of what you're supposed to do. It's not relentlessly pushing you toward the next objective or the next mission marker. That stuff is there if you want. But if you want to just cruise around and blow stuff up, then that's a very valid way to play that game. and definitely one that I whiled away many hours doing, whereas games now, I guess, tend to push you,

not that there aren't plenty of digressions and side quests and more ways than ever in which to spend slash waste time. But GTA3 just did not seem very concerned with, okay, we've got to direct them onto the next plot point. Yeah, and I'm always curious about the degree to which games like this were, really just testing the limitations of like the software and the technology and trying to like see what we can get away with especially this kind of transitional moment in gaming history or maybe transitional is the wrong word but i mean you really look at the like technological leaps of between certain at different periods of you know the last 30 years and like this is this PlayStation to PlayStation 2 era is like i mean the the leap is like unbelievable and and certainly it's something to think about now when like you know the PS4 to the PS5, like, it's not, to me, it wasn't that exceptional in terms of a, like, I'm sure, like, you know, as a developer, there's, there's many things under the hood that I just have no awareness of, but, you know,

as a gamer, as someone who's just experiencing it, like, I can't really, you know, it's, it's not, it's not nearly as consequential of a leap. But, you know, I'm sure, but at the same time, as I say that, I'm sure there's going to be things in GTA6 that are, um, you know, unbelievable in terms of their, you know, cinematic realism or whatever it is. I mean, I'm very excited about it. It's surprising. I've sort of surprised myself with my anticipation. Like I was watching these trailers and getting like, honestly, like a little, it's crazy to say, but I was like, I'm a little, almost like emotional watching this. I'm like, wow, I've been playing these games for like 25 years and like it looks so, it looks so cool and there's

so much going on. And like, you know, they really, really seems like the developers of like, actually like really leaned into the cinematic sensibility in a way that's like actually good and not just kind of like a gamer's idea of like what is like good you know um yeah i mean i was even and this is crazy but you know my my wife who is not a gamer at all like even not even like a little bit it's like called the controller like twice in her life like she earnestly looked her to me and said was like you know like i can't believe i'd ever said this but like i kind of want to watch you play this and you know i'm like i'm a um um elder millennials they say i'm like wow what a what a what a crazy state of affairs to say that this is where this is where this is my

relationship is like turned where I've somehow like brainwashed this intelligent independent woman into like getting excited to watch her husband play a video game but at the same time like yeah I'm excited to watch myself play you know so that I think is and and you know there's like nothing there's no new game that I like have ever heard that from and you know that's not even the first I even we had dinner with some friends the other day and our friend she said you know I'm really excited to hear to watch my boyfriend play this game and we just turned and looked at each other and like wow it's spreading and it's like really real like there is something to this um you know immersion that is uh the sense that like here's a

game in which like all this stuff is just going to happen that is but in a way that is like visually engaging and you know the thing that rock star frankly doesn't get enough credit for is just how high higher quality the voice acting and dialogue is in their games compared to like almost like anything else. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been playing something with like any sort of semblance of story or dialogue. And my wife just turns to me and is like, can you turn that down? That's like the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. And it's like a game that is like, you know, I'm not going to name names, but it is like a game that has been particularly acclaimed for its characters and its dialogue. And I just like, I think of myself, I'm like, this is pretty bad, you know?

Like, I'm just sort of tuning it out because like I don't really care. but if you're just like, you know, I'm trying to play the game, really. But if you're really just like listening and there's no sort of like engagement quality, you're just like, this is just corny and like reality written. It sounds bad. The actors don't sound convincing. The dialogue is corny. And I feel like that's like 90% of what gets, you know, it's like basic.

It's sad to say, but I find myself just like skipping through cinematics like so many, so much these days is I'm like, I can't bear to like watch this. That's a cardinal sin to be a cutscene skipper, but I understand the temptation. because yes, I think we do look at it through a lens as lifelong gamers. We forgive certain lapses. We may be great on a curve. But it's true that this will certainly be a mainstream crossover hit slash sensation. I mean, to quote the bard, Taylor Swift, touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.

So everyone's playing or watching or doing something else while people are playing in the proximity. But yeah, I have thought about that a little bit because I don't want to valorize the back in my day. We did it this way and it was harder and it was better because it was harder, you know, thinking about the dodo in Grand Theft Auto 3, which was the airplane, which was barely flyable and was really a re-skinned car. And it took great skill and technique even to keep the thing airborne. And yet, when you were able to do that, there was such a thrill in experiencing the game from that vantage point. And that's not to say that there isn't still that I'm not looking forward to jetting or grabbing a helicopter and flying across Vice City with the incredible picturesque landscapes that will be presented to us. But there was something about the charm, the primitive charm back then of just those first faltering steps. because it really was just the transition to 3D

because this was our first GTA game, I guess, but GTA predated GTA 3, as is suggested by the 3 in the title. And 1 and 2 weren't all that different in terms of gameplay and tone. It's just that the transition to 3D and the release from the shackles that that imposed, that was so transformative.

And there really is something, and it's not just nostalgia speaking, to that idea, that games were growing by leaps and bounds because it was a fledgling medium at the time. And so the technological leaps were so significant that they unlocked great gameplay leaps correspondingly. And so I don't want to look back and say, yes, I wish we could go back to the dodo. I think that dodo is extinct for a reason as well.

And yet there was something to that. Yeah, well, to, I mean, honestly, I find myself getting a little bit of indulging the tendency or you're cautioning against, just because I do think, you know, a lot of these games were strongly defined by the amount of like built in friction in them, just like the stuff that wasn't easy or fun, frankly, which when you're a kid or a teenager or like a, you know, a young person doesn't really matter as much. And like, it's sad to say this, but I do think it kind of, or it's crazy to say this maybe, but I do maybe believe that it kind of like built some like character and some fortitude, you know, a little bit. I mean, this is, uh, you know, I was,

I was on, I was on X the everything app the other day and like reading about people like, modern gamers getting so upset trying to play like Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 because like the games are like kind of challenging in, in some parts. And they're like just throwing these tantrums like how I don't understand how you could defeat like, you know, this particular boss battle. And I'm thinking to myself, like, you know, I played this game when I was like 13 or 14 or something. And like, I did it. You know what I mean? And like, yeah, okay, it has the mechanics are a little janky and you can't skip the, you can't skip the cinematics and that's really annoying. But also, like, you could do it. You know, I don't think it's the, there's a game that was designed for children

to play. Literally. It's a Disney game, like, plus, you know, Final Fantasy. And, but, you know, you just had to ensure you have more time when you're young, but also, you know, people, it's not like people are more conscientious about the hours they put into gaming these days. But there is, as with like an Eldon Ring or Dark Souls, like you kind of have to like get a little good and, you know, practice. And really, you know, take, you can't just like throw bodies at the wall until you break through. And while that's certainly frustrating, I can't really make a case for it, is like the superior experience.

Like I do think you just like it's fine ultimately, you know, Like, it's not the worst thing in the way. A game is not badly designed just because you can't beat the boss on like two tries. You know, sometimes sometimes you have to just, yeah, you have to get good, so to speak. And it's like, I promise you, if like an eighth grader in the Bush administration could like figure this out, I am positive that you with access to like YouTube tutorials and everything, like you can just, you can just do this and not like move on. Yeah, designed for kids, although I had to enlist my unwitting.

grandma to get it for me because my local game store would not sell it to me as a minor at the time. I think the sequels I had to get seniors in my high school maybe to buy it for me. It was like, I was not standing in front of the 7-Eleven asking people to buy me beer or whatever. I was like, please buy me this M-rated game that I can't buy. I was having a debate with a colleague about whether or not it was accurate to say that, like, all adults have more discretionary income than kids because, you know, obviously a lot of people don't have that much money. But I'm like, yeah, but even being poor as an adult means you have more discretionary income than like a child who has no income whatsoever. It's just they exist entirely at the large as of others.

Yes. And a lot of technology is cheaper. I was actually thinking about that because, of course, people complain about the prices of games these days and even GTA6 specifically, right, which is $80 or $100 if you want to get the version with the bells and whistles. Now, DTA3 costs $4999 in October 2001, which equates. to about 95 bucks now. So if you do the inflation adjustments, yeah, the price tags were a little lower, but in terms of buying power,

not really necessarily. And you go back even earlier than that when you had N64 cartridge games costing a fortune. So it wasn't always an easy hobby to invest in. Yeah, and if you crunch the numbers on it, I mean, it's such an investment. You're like, oh, my God.

Right. Even if you spend, you know, it's very easy to imagine spending like, you know, at least, you know, 50 hours on this thing, 40 hours if you play it to its completion. You're like, I'm paying like $2 an hour, you know?

I mean, like you compare it to like any other. And this is, not to, not to get on my soapbox, but I really do feel that like gamers have, so many gamers have such little appreciation for how, like, how good they got it,

you know? It's like, if you want to, if you're like a cinephile, you read books, like the cost of keeping up with like everything is just so much more. I want to say in terms of like, you know, because you theoretically have all the time, or even if you're like paying for a record, it's just, it's so much more expensive as opposed to,

you know, I mean, what, you just want on-demand access to like everything for free, which is, I guess I understand. But the idea that like, you know, GTA is going to cost like as much as like four movie tickets in the year 2026 is like, boy, that's a pretty good bargain in terms of the time incurred. Yeah, at least movie tickets where we live in the New York area, which will set you back considerably. But yes, I was thinking about this too because, okay, I will resist the urge to suggest that the dodo was better than whatever flying vehicles we have in GTA 6. That's certainly not the case. And there are quality of life improvements that I absolutely would not renounce now.

I think not having mission checkpoints in GTA3, for example. or even if you could freely roam around the world just to have loading screens if you started a mission, that sort of thing. I don't miss that. One thing that I do legitimately miss, I think, is the lack of handholding. You know, this is, of course, a frequent conversation now when it comes to AAA games and Marvel's Wolverine and are they telegraphing everything. And the thing about GTA3, which I do lament the loss of in this franchise specifically, is the emergent gameplay. as you wrote about it in your piece, where they would give you a mission objective

and how you actually achieved that objective was in large degree up to you. And it stood out to me in GTA5, where it was very much, okay, here's the mission, here's the objective, also here's an arrow telling you where to go. There's a mission where you have to park a tractor trailer or a semi-truck across a highway to stop someone,

and it tells you strictly specifically prescribes, here's where to park the thing, here's the glowing area in which to, whereas in GTA3, you could organically come up with a solution like that. Hey, okay, this target is going to be driving by here. Maybe I'll just put some cars there so that they'll run into them and crash

and you could discover that stuff on your own. And yes, the fact that there was no map really other than the mini map and it wouldn't tell you where to go and what to do exactly. There's sometimes a downside to that, especially if you're pressed for time and you want to, quote, unquote, accomplish something. But there was a real charm to that, too, that I miss. And I'm holding out some hope that there will be a little bit more of that in GTA6, that it will be more hands off in terms of just, hey, do this thing. But how you achieve that is largely up to you because that was a great part of the thrill in the original, so to speak.

Yeah, it's hard. I mean, they have such different audiences to serve these days. I mean, and I sort of feel like there's kind of no right answer in terms of how much or how little to give away to the player. You know, I mean, I loved a game like Eldron Ring, which doesn't really hold your hand in terms of like telling you where to go or having like checkpoints. But, you know, also if you weren't playing it actively,

it's just easy to forget what's going on. Like, I don't think, to me, there's no perfect amount of accessibility. that will, in terms of the design, that will account for, you know, every player's desire. I just hope that, I hope that they land on the side of not doing too much handholding. Because, you know, to be honest, I did kind of enjoy, I did enjoy the handholding a Wolverine because I was like, oh, I just got like 20 minutes to, like, play. Like, thanks. I had this blue line like telling me where to go fantastic.

But then I was sort of put off because it's like selectively handholding. And I found myself, like, somehow, you know, just brain dead. enough to like miss some things in some of these missions which like made me feel really insulted. I'm like, wow, like this is a game for like babies in turn. But like I'm like somehow like missing out like not completing everything because like I'm disturbed me because you train me to say to think that you're going to point out everything that's worth like paying attention to. And then like to kind of like hide something in the background like, you know, I felt I felt very

slighted. Yeah. Put it down. Relatedly, I guess a lot of your navigation of labor. City and GTA3 was down to your memory and you're just knowing the map and knowing the roots and knowing the layout. And that would be pretty unfeasible in this era because the maps have increased in size so exponentially that you could almost never know your way around. And at the time, Liberty City seemed vast, but it's actually by comparison quite modest in size. And the virtue of that,

I think, even though now we might consider it limiting by comparison, but when you knew your way around Liberty City, you really knew your way around. You just knew, okay, here's a shortcut, or here's a side street I can cut down, or I need to get there, here's the best path to take. And so there was a real sense of accomplishment to navigating that world as opposed to just say, sticking a pin in a giant map or having an arrow direct you to that place. I was thinking of this also because people, of course, have already obsessively documented, I think, three to 400 vehicles in GTA6 that have been identified just because they have appeared in the footage that's online.

So who knows what the true number is. And GTA3, I think there were fewer than 60 cars or vehicle variants at all. And so, yes, that seems like a constraint. But on the other hand, when you saw a vehicle driving by, you knew what it was. often by name, and you knew, oh, I'm going to grab this banshee, and this is what it's going to feel like. And each car had its specific handling that you could anticipate. And so I do miss that bespoke aspect, even though I understand why there's been this great proliferation in everything. There was something to be said for something being small enough that it was actually manageable, that you could know Liberty City like the back of your hand.

Yeah. Yeah, and the thing that I'm looking forward to is, you know, gaining that kind of familiarity with some shortcuts that pop up. Because, you know, it's, of course, I haven't played these games in years at this point. But I do remember that slight familiarity becoming possible with a, you know, GTA 4 or GTA 5 or, you know, a game like Alden Ring or any sort of open world in which, like, just by nature, repetition, you are going to remember where. like some of these kind of shortcuts and how these maps are laid out. And hopefully it just makes sense. Yeah, the size, the array of activities you go back and play now and you think, oh, gosh, where are all the mini games and all the things I've now become accustomed to,

if you look up on how long to beat the average playtime to finish Grand Theft Auto 3, the main story 14 hours, the completionist play through 36 and a half hours, that's a bite-sized game these days, let alone an open world game, let alone a GTA game. And so, yes, especially if you're going to take 13 years to release a sequel, then people are expecting a ton of bang for your buck and that it's just going to consume your life maybe for months on end. And I don't bemoan that. I'm looking forward to just immersing myself in Vice City for however long that lasts.

But also, games can become overwhelming. And there is a certain amount of open world bloat and so many activities and map icons that it can become overwhelming. So there's a happy medium there. I guess, you know, it's just, it's sort of spiraled. It's ramped up with each subsequent release that, hey, we are just actually trying to replicate the real world in all of its many and varied possibilities. And I guess there are tradeoffs there. That's a good thing in a lot of respects. It can also be so daunting that maybe it stops you.

you from even getting involved. Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic. I mean, my stamina, my ability to finish see some of these AAA games to the end has really declined in the last few years. Versus, you know, I've made this like running joke that like for me, like, Eldon Ring was like the last video game like ever just because like it's, it kind of hit all of my knees while not being too.

I mean, the fact that there's like barely any cinematics in it, I'm like, this is great. Like I just don't have to like, I can just play and don't have to watch. And I do get hung up on the sort of, I mean, to me, the friction these days is like, yeah, the immersive, the very complicated story or the abundance of like choice, so to speak. I mean, it's a finicky thing. I think with the GTA, you know, the through line will be the missions, the story, the main story, so to speak. But I'm with Red Dead redemption, you know, I didn't get more than, you know, I played it for like 20. 20 to 30 hours, which is, you know, quite a long chunk of time, but is like nothing, basically,

like in the game, you know, which I have complicated feelings about it. I mean, you want to, I don't think that I, I don't believe you should have to like slavishly give over all of your free time to something in order to like get the most out of it. But at the same time, it is a, you know, it is a time burning medium to say the least. And the market has spoken, I suppose, and people want more and bigger ostensibly. And yes, there can be fatigue and people can denigrate the map game or the Ubisoft game. And sometimes you just need a breather from that. But in terms of the scale of GTA3, so this game sold six million copies within its first

year of release and earned more than $250 million in revenue, which was a lot then. and it was one of the best-selling games on PS2. It sold about 14.5 million copies to date. And that's a pittance. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Rockstar will reap from GTA6. And I think the estimates are that there are already about half that many copies pre-ordered, just the digital pre-orders. And Bloomberg noted last week,

some analysts expect the next Grand Theft Auto to sell 40 million copies on PlayStation and Xbox and generate more than $3 billion in revenue in its first four months. And that's before it comes to PC, which seems like it might happen pretty soon. So really, it's ramped up not just the scale of the games, but also the adoption of the games. And I guess that's a good thing that this can become this kind of cultural phenomenon in that way, where we think of just this industry shaking impact of GTA3 and yet compared to the sales and revenue expectations for GTA6 with 13 years of buildup.

And of course, that's reflected in the cost that it takes to make one of these games and the time it takes to make one of these games. And GTA3 was made in about two years by a core team of a couple dozen people. And now we're talking about 13 years and thousands of people, and entire studios springing up just to handle pedestrian dialogue and behavior in TTA6. This is an industry unto itself.

Yeah, and I don't, you know, this is maybe, or this is not maybe, this is probably a very shallow comparison, but part of me begins to think of a studio like rock stars, a sort of a filmmaker like James Cameron, someone who's like, I have been blessed with these maximalist resources to enact a gigantic, vision that I want to be the most popular thing ever. You know, I want to make a movie that

is seeing my more people that have ever seen a movie before. So what are the things that I'm going to put into it? What are the ideas? Like, what am I trying to tap into? And, you know, I think the people, from what I've read, you know, the people at Rockstar are, they're artisans, you know, they're crafting something very elaborate with a lot of care. And, you know, to the point earlier about how these stories have developed and their sensibility, you know, I mean, there's real stories to these games. And I think to me, GTA 5 was a little bit of a letdown on the narrative front

because it did seem a little like, you know, more callous, I would say. But, you know, I'm very heartened by the idea that GTA 6 is like centering on this like relationship and just, you know, the experience of being in love. I mean, what a basic, what a basic simple thing to dedicate your story to yet, and yet still like you're going to be reaching possibly

more gamers than ever than anything else. So why not? Why not recommit yourself to, you know, as James Cameron recommits himself to like, you know, the importance of the family or like the, you know, the importance of saving the environment or whatever, these themes that are very simple. And yet when enacted on such like a widescreen front with such like impressive technological displays of, you know, these jaw-dropping visuals, like can be quite powerful in its simplicity. So, you know, it's, you know, it's,

I know it's still a GTA and I'm hoping that, like, I certainly don't want it to be like the grim, sober narrative, but I'm truly excited to see what they are able to come up with in terms of, you know, making something that feels real, like worth spending your time on. I mean, I think the debate about whether or not games or art is a little, you know, it's a little played out at this point. But, you know, I, to me at least, like, it does, there's a lot of games that are pretty conceptually thin that get a lot of mainstream traction.

And I would love if this, you know, it would, I think it would be a win for the medium if it's not too, too lofty if this game is actually like, you know, there's stuff going on in it. I was also wondering about that because the moral panic that GTA3 and its immediate successors engendered, it's hard to imagine. that happening with a game today, just that Fierer, Jack Thompson, all the concerned parents. It's not that video games and violent video games aren't still trotted out from time to time in the wake of various

tragedies and used as a scapegoat. And it's not as if there's any shortage of other moral panics in society or legitimate panics for that matter, but it does seem as if maybe we've moved on from this. And I wondered with the scale and fidelity of GTA6, could that come back in any way. It also seems like Rockstar is just more conscious of the weight of that and maybe

the responsibility of that. And certainly they've set out to tell a more mature and sophisticated and sensitive story. And we will see how successful they are in that endeavor. But 25 years on, I mean, it seems almost quaint for a game like GTA3, which which appears almost primitive now to have generated that incredible backlash. Well, what's amazing is I think, I think I, this observation, I was reminded of this on, again, on X.com, but, you know, take two is there, aren't this guy Scottish? Am I crazy?

Like, is that, like, Rockstar? Yeah, I mean, many of the developers of, Yeah, like, this game, yeah, Rockstar, like, began and like, you know, it has its roots, like, it's, it's, it's, for, something that makes such a grand commentary on America. Like it is like not strictly an American product. But

yeah, it's you know, I'm excited. I think it's going to be good. It's weird to sort of like detach your you know, your journalistic objectivity. But like you know, it's, I feel as sure I think like this

rock star and like from software to me are like the two France studios where I'm like okay, it's like, it's going to be good. Yeah, like, the degree is just like to what level of goodness? Although, you know, I guess I know there's a lot of differing opinions on Red Dead Redemption, too. It's lifelessness is, I've certainly read engaging criticisms of it.

And which, you know, frankly, given the fact that I only played so much of it, I guess I agree with. But there's no denying how impressive it is on a technical front. Yeah, the track record is pretty sterling. the question is not so much will it be good as will it be groundbreaking in any semblance of the way that GTA3 was or will it just seem like more and maybe better and more polished and certainly higher profile and fancier and bells and whistles. I mean, it's funny to look back. Of course, part of the joy of GTA3 was the talk radio and some of the spoofs. But in terms of licensed music, it was much more limited. And now we're seeing soundtrack

albums with the leading artists of every genre coming together to make music and original music for GTA6. It's just a different kind of cultural product, really. And it will certainly be better in a lot of respects. You go back and play GTA3 and the shooting and the aiming. It's extremely onerous, right, which was often the case with those early boundary-breaking 3D games because they were still navigating how things worked with that extra dimension and how do you do locking on and targeting and rotating the camera and all of that. And we've, we've largely worked out those kinks, at least in the past 25 years. But you wonder about copycats. I talked earlier on this episode about game cloning, AI-based game cloning, where you're just essentially ripping the code.

But of course, the concept of game clones is not new. And there were a multitude of clones in the wake of GTA3, which you documented in your piece and you talked to some of the developers of the those games such as Saints Row, which were sort of shameless GTA rip-offs. We might call them GTA likes today, I guess, if this were happening the way that we say Souls likes. But many of those games were good, and I'm glad that they existed. And even if they were sort of generic brands, knockoff GTAs, GTA was so great that we just had an insatiable hunger for more of that, that even Rockstar working at an incredible page,

where, you know, they're pumping out Vicetian a year after that, which is amazing. That was not meeting the demand. And so, yeah, I'll sign up to play Simpsons hit and run because this game is great. Yeah, I used to live in a neighborhood that had a very critically acclaimed bodega where the sandwiches were, like, quite good, actually. Like, even, you know, they're like genuinely just good sandwiches that they made. And, but what was notable to me was that all of the other bodegas and the surrounding, like, six blocks or so, like, all. so were good. Like they weren't as quite as good, but it was clear that some logic it kicked in where it's like, okay, if these people don't want to wait 15 minutes in line to get like a sandwich,

they can, as was off to the case, 15 minutes or longer, they can come here and we'll make one that's about like 80% is good, but you don't have to wait as all. And doesn't that sound like a good bet? And, you know, of course, you know, it's like if you get sick of replaying like Jha the story, then like, why not just tap in and get player are slightly different narrative. But, you know, the Saints Row thing is funny because that sense of humor was so pure out by comparison. And like, you know, even though GTA was, was hardly like some beacon of sophistication and intelligence. Like, I guess I never really found it to be, I mean, this is probably just nostalgia.

There's like a million like grotesque things in a game that are like an off color and uncouth. But for some reason, like, it's, it's funny to see that a lot of the copycats like turned it up a little bit more. somehow. So I guess I'm wondering what the, what is the incident that these, what is the cheaper satisfaction that some of the clones will chase? Yeah, and the alternate history scenarios are fascinating. Of course, Rockstar offered GTA3 to Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive,

which Microsoft said no, because it was too adult and the predecessors didn't sell so well, and you wonder, well, what would that have meant for the console wars? the one-two punch of Halo and GTA3 as exclusives, or at least console exclusives, for the early days of Xbox back then. And then what would have happened to just every open-world game, not to suggest that GTA-3 was the first open-world game in spirit or in actuality, but it just delivered on that dream in a way that no other game had. And if it hadn't, then some other game would have, most likely. and maybe we would all be talking about, I don't know, the getaway or Saints Row. Would we have Saints Row?

I don't know, but we would have had something along those lines or the godfather or mafia or whatever it was, right, all the games in that GTA molds. Someone was going to come along and make this thing. But if it hadn't happened then and it hadn't been rock star, then how would things have changed? No one knows because we play any open world game now and you can kind of trace the DNA back to GTA 3, which is just this, this, or open world adventure game.

Yeah, and it's so basic as like, you know, the triangle button being the button that gets into the car or the horse or the vehicle. I mean, that's almost a universal language across like all these modern games. Like, I can't tell you the, I was actually, I've been playing Death Stranding too, and I think the button you pressed to get into the car

is a square button or, you know, the left-hand button on the, for everyone is an Xbox player instead. And it's shocking how many times I try to hit the triangle instead instinctively, you know, and it just doesn't, it does nothing. But it is, it's coded into, and this is, stuff is easy to take it for granted when you're just playing this stuff all the time. But it is amazing that like this, yeah, this franchise like literally changed the way in which like people's default instinct for what functions, certain functions are performed in games.

Like that is just now built into. to our own DNA. Yeah, I do wonder what it would have happened. I mean, I think so much of the appeal of GTA is that it's just, it's fun to be in a city, you know? It's like I really like to play in cyberpunk, cyberpunk not because it was, you know, the gameplay was super original. But, you know, it's nice to be in a car in a big city and just like driving really fast.

Yes. In a way that's, it's viscerally different than, say, being in a horse or, you know, some of these other settings where you've seen open worlds. stuff. It's nice to go fast and it's nice to be listening to some music. These are things that people do in real life. And while I appreciate the playing a game like Ghost of Yote, where you can kind of enjoy the idyllic countryside, like, you know, I like the modern stuff. Yeah. Yeah, when I wax nostalgic about this game or other games, I'm always struck by how it is the most mundane, banal activities that stand out to me.

And you mentioned this in your piece years ago that one of the things that would distinguish one person's GTA playthrough from another person's is that you could accomplish missions in a different way, but maybe a different song or snippet of conversation would be on the radio when you were doing that. And so it felt like an experience that was unique to you. And when I look forward to GTA 6, yeah, I'm interested in the gameplay and the plot and all the bells and whistles. But also I'm most looking forward, I think, to just kind of cruising. around by city and just stumbling across things and having music be on the radio as the sun comes up. And sometimes I think, like, I live in New York City. I could just go outside and walk around and see pedestrians who are actual people and people watch and explore and get

into adventures, which is one of the nice things about living in a city like this. And yet somehow, when you port that into a video game world, and of course, there's a whole thriving, genre of simulators, right? Supermarket simulator. You do some sort of mundane occupation, but it's a video game and therefore it's fun, something that you might consider busy work or a chore if you were doing it in real life. Somehow in a video game context, it's engaging. And nobody's better at that than Rockstar, given the attention to detail and the time and the budget and all the rest of it to just fully flesh out that world, whereas other developers might have to cut corners.

Yeah, I mean, on the flip side, like, you might even be drawn into this game because of your love of doing that stuff in real life. You know, it's not that you're, it's not that you're substituting the real thing with, like, lesser thing. You're just kind of like, you're enjoying the, quote unquote, lesser thing because of your own, because of your real life appreciation, which, you know, many, not everyone can say the same. I mean, obviously, we know the joys of being in the city and casual people watching.

you know, it's, you can't always, you can't just go really fast in a motorcycle and jump off and, you know, catapulted into some, you know, blow something up. Yes. I wonder, I wonder of my own, I feel like my own capacity for just committing random acts of, like, extraordinary violence is probably dipped a little bit in my softness of older age. But, you know, I'm sure, as I'm sure at some point, you know, mostly I just don't want to get arrested. And lose all the ammo or whatever. There are more consequences, not just a wanted level, but actual, actual hard time that you might have to do. And yes, I guess maybe part of it is just indulging your id without worrying about the ramifications. And also as a true lifelong New Yorker, I don't even drive. And I'm not licensed to. So I was saying, I don't drive at all.

That's great. So if I want to drive, I guess I got to do it in GTA, really. But yes, you know, I was looking back at the Samhouser rock star co-founder quote back then when he was describing the game. And he described it as Zelda meets Goodfellas, or I guess as the spoof posters in the game said, bad fellas. This was not exactly the most subtle humor back then. But everything old is new again. All this has happened before and will happen again because, of course, November is going to be Aquarina of Time remake, followed by GTA6, the successor to GTA3.

So 25 years have passed. Maybe not that much has changed. But I have enjoyed this walk or drive-by down memory lane and look forward to making more memories next month. And maybe in 25 more years, we will reconvene even more aged and decrepit and gray than we are now to reminisce about what it was like to play GTA6 in 2026. Yeah, I wonder if this is going to be the last one that they make, the numeric one. I mean, it's really hard to imagine, like, another, like, decade plus of development and technological advancement. I mean, what am I talking about? Of course, they're going to make another one, like, the money.

But, you know, it's a real question of, like, what resources will they be, you know, be given? Like, it's not a – you can't just, like, assume that they're going to be given as much time and money. And, you know, I wonder, you know, we all know about the – you know, there's plenty of trends of – Game studios are subject to the same economic tailwinds as anyone else. So, you know, I plan to appreciate this while I can. Yes, and the destabilizing effects of AI and all the rest of it is just, yes, is this sort of the last gasp of a dying model of game development and the fullest expression of it or will it be so successful that it does help perpetuate that?

The other thing, of course, is that when you bought GTA3, you play. it and you could tool around to your heart's content, but when the game was over, it was over, and you moved on to the next one. And of course, there were expansions and there were sequels in that era or patches or especially on PC. But now, of course, GTA is a living, breathing entity or will be, not at launch, but eventually we will get the sequel to GTA online. And one reason why, of course, it took so long for GTA6 to arrive was not just because of the scope of it, but because Rockstar is minting money and making money hand over fist from GTA online, which is this ever-evolving entity, right? And so it's the old games as a service, live service model, which certainly

has suffered some blows in recent years. But that's the idea is that you're putting out GTA6. And that will tide at least some portion of the audience over until the eventual GTA 7. I know Rockstar has said that they will make the next one more quickly. We will see because, of course, they are just really raking it in as they get people just to occupy that world indefinitely. So that's another thing where I guess it's, yeah, it was kind of nice when games were just a discrete experience that had a beginning, middle, and end, and then you moved on to something else. Then again, I'm sure plenty of people who have sunk countless hours into TTA online over the past decade are thinking, no, this is great, actually, that it never ends, that I can roleplay

and I can do whatever I want and live in this world as sort of a second life existence. Yeah, I never got into GTA online. There was just like too much going on. I mean, I, you know, I'm old school. I like the idea of like experiencing someone's vision, right, and like not being too headcan and about it. Like, I like the, I love to place my trust in someone else's, like, someone's vision. Yeah, more curated experience, I suppose.

Yeah. Well, it has been a joy to talk to you and to remember. I'm glad that we were there so that we can testify to the impact in the moment and tell the youngs what it was like when we were young. And we were first confronted with the spectacle that was Grand Theft Auto 3. Thank you very much, Jeremy. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. One other thing that hopefully has changed since 2001 at Rockstar and elsewhere, a little less crunch in game development.

If that means games take a little longer to make, so be it. Can AI help without putting people out of jobs? Are buggy games made by humans better than buggy games made by AI? Maybe so spiritually, one way or another. LLMs have not proven to be the NFT-type fad that some initially wrote them off as. Regardless, button mash remains human-made and human-produced, often by Devin Romaldo, who is off today for their birthday. Happy birthday, Dev.

And thank you to Isaiah Blakely for filling in. Thanks also to Arjuna Ramco-Pal for his. senior podcast management. You can contact ButtonMash at RingiverseGaming at gmail.com. Buttmash will be back next week. We have much more coming down the pike. We'll catch up with some first-person shooters, including the new Call of Duty. Phantom Blade Zero comes out soon.

And after that, of course, the Ocarina remake, followed by Grant Theft Auto6. Maybe the most fitting quote to end this episode with, give it our AI discussion. And the bummer bioware news would be Sovereign's line in the original Mass Effect. Saying something we might hear EA say today. We impose order on the key. chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it. But I'll end on a more sentimental note as I press F to pay respects to buy a wear. As Admiral Anderson said in Mass Effect 3, you did good, son, you did good. I'm proud of you.

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