If you’re even the slightest bit online, you’ve probably already heard, but something unthinkably, pivotally important happened in the world of Grand Theft Auto today: Tom Walker posted the ending of his maximum-traffic-speed playthrough of GTA IV.
The greatest romance that ever has or ever will be depicted in Rockstar’s satirical setting, Walker’s playthrough orbited around cars’ almost gravitational attraction to main character Niko Bellic. Also, said cars, due to a cheeky little settings modification, moved at a million miles per hour. The central challenge made itself clear within several seconds of the beginning of any stream or video: avoid the titular autos at all costs.
"I get the idea in my head that I will defeat stupid challenges that don't matter pretty often,” Walker told Aftermath last year. “To me one of the most human things you can do is commit yourself to a challenge that doesn't matter, that only you care about and that you could stop doing at any time. If life is suffering, why not choose more suffering – and more life?"
Walker kept at it for the better part of a year, actually completing his run in late 2024, but only just now uploading the final fruits of his labor to YouTube. The complete saga is a ride, and I can’t recommend it enough. You’d think that after witnessing a two-ton death trap emerge seemingly from nowhere to splatter a hapless career criminal over a thousand times, it’d stop being funny. And yet!
Toward the end of his run, Walker battled not just every single car in Liberty City, but also conflicting emotions. Getting one ending didn’t feel as revelatory as he’d hoped, so he went back and got the game’s other, darker ending in which Niko’s cousin, Roman, dies. What ensued was peak cinema, with Walker hunting down the game’s final foe as his health meter flashed red, fully aware that a single stray bullet would force him to restart an arduous multi-part mission he’d already attempted several times. He took a deep breath and urged himself to calm down. Then he rounded a corner, squeezed the trigger, and that was that.
"I hate that the last message I saw in the chat before I got this was 'You've got this, kitten,'" he said immediately afterward.
The video ends with what is all at once a promise from Walker to the audience and a threat from Walker to Walker: “FAST GTA WILL RETURN.”
