It's 2026, And I'm Playing GTA V For The First Time

I’ve been broadly immune from the GTA VI hype, not for any principled reasons but because I’ve just never played a Grand Theft Auto game. This has been largely circumstantial, as someone who didn’t own a console when they all released and who tends to dislike driving games. But the recent flurry of GTA VI looks got curiosity gnawing at my brain, wanting to share in the excitement of my peers and feeling drawn to a big open world to explore. And since VI won’t be coming to PC until god-knows-when, I’ve decided to do the only thing I can: finally install the copy of GTA V that’s been sitting on my computer for years.

I picked up GTA V when it was free on the Epic store all the way back in 2020, my curiosity largely piqued by having spent years editing Zack Zwiezen’s stories about GTA Online for Kotaku. Zack made the game sound like a weird alternate universe full of the kind of day-to-day life management that I love about survival games, and I hoped the single-player would be that but without other players griefing me into quitting. “I could be a GTA guy,” I confidently told myself in 2020, before proceeding to never think about the game sitting in my Epic library again.

A few weekends ago I finally decided to install it. This took a while: Between the Epic store being, well, itself, and my Rockstar account deciding I didn’t exist over and over until it randomly decided oh no wait I did, between account syncs that warned me they failed but didn’t seem to affect anything to having to install BattleEye, my first hour with the game was just a maze of pop-ups and error messages. Once I got into the game, though, things have run pretty smoothly. (Well, smoothly barring that it seems like the combination of using Epic and installing the game on a new SSD means that I can’t tell if my screenshots aren’t saving at all, or if they’re just being saved to some place where I have no hope of finding them. So sorry for the lack of images in this post; I didn’t realize until it was too late! Rest assured every screenshot I took was terrible anyway.)

It’s weird to play a very old GTA when I’ve never played one before, and when my only reference for this style of Rockstar game is having not finished Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve struggled a bit with the tutorials, which appear as tiny text prompts in the upper left of my screen and frequently disappear before I can internalize them. In Franklin’s first “real” mission, where he has to shoot a man fleeing on a motorbike while driving, I kept missing or misunderstanding which buttons I had to press so many times that I had to pause the game and go Google it. I then proceeded to fail the execution of this mechanic so many times that the game finally let me skip the mission, a choice I have continued to make every time the mechanic has arisen, and which I’m sure will have no consequences on my time with the rest of the game at all.

Mostly what I’ve done in the game so far is wander around. I’ve only done a couple of Franklin’s missions and two of Michael’s, spending the rest of my time switching between the characters to explore their various neighborhoods. The world is definitely big–the other night I thought I was driving Michael toward one of his question mark sidequests, but when I couldn’t find it I instead walked the whole beach to the fairgrounds, rode the rides, then stole a jet ski and tried to see if I could circumnavigate the entirety of the map. Things hit a snag when I stopped to explore a little island and returned to find my jet ski had not just floated away but seemingly despawned. I stole a boat and kept going, before irrevocably beaching the boat and ending up having to walk for ages through rural dirt roads until I could find a car. A lot of my in-game time has been spent this way: stranding myself on the farthest edges of the map and having to time-consumingly work my way inland again.

I also spent multiple in-game days attempting to locate a bicycle. When I discovered that I couldn’t just buy a bike from the in-game internet and store it in Michael’s garage, I wandered the streets of Los Santos hoping to come across one. Eventually I turned to the real-life internet for help, which told me bikes could be found at the beach, the only place in GTA V I can reliably navigate myself to. But I spent full nights and days skulking around parking lot bike racks hoping someone with a bike would come by while they steadfastly did not. Eventually, I walked my way to a bike rental place and nicked one there, which has led to me biking all over town in Michel’s ridiculous jeans and coat, with the current aim of getting back to a national park I passed so I can do some off-road riding. (The game is way more fun on a bike than in a car, if you ask me.)

While exploring is what I most like to do in open-world games anyway, it’s also been a way to ease myself into what GTA V actually seems to be. The atmosphere is crass in a way games aren’t anymore–one of the first interactable businesses I came across was a strip club where I could watch a shiny, skimpily-dressed woman writhe in front of me. I also went to a movie, in which a cartoon robot murdered a female robot for rejecting his advances. There are poop and dick and sex and gay jokes everywhere, in a way I think most games, if they haven’t rejected them outright, are at least more artful with today. Maybe some of this was funny in 2013, but in 2026 it mostly feels embarrassing.

In his 2022 re-review of the game for Polygon, Cameron Kunzelman wrote that “Back when the game originally released, I called it conservative… Now I would call it out of touch — even for the era in which it was released.” Some of the game feels like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too, leaning on the South Park defense of making fun of everyone while still essentially being the thing it’s making fun of. There’s a crude cynicism to its humor that, looking through the lens of 2026, is hard to write off as simply dated. And it feels like it’s trying to appeal to a particular vision of “gamers” that isn’t just inaccurate today, but toxic in a different way than it was in 2013.

It’s bizarre to play a game whose satirical politics are closer to the Tea Party than MAGA; even though so many of the same conspiracies and hatreds carry through, lines of thought that felt easy to write off or mock back then feel much more serious today. And it’s kind of shocking to play a game that feels like it’s both teasing and catering to a vision of an audience that was crafted before Gamergate. So many of the game’s jokes feel like Gamergate dog whistles, and I have to keep reminding myself that they can’t be, because there weren’t those dogs to whistle at when Rockstar’s developers were making the game. The elements of what would become Gamergate were there, of course; there’s a prescience to GTA V, at the same time as I think there’s no way its developers could have known precisely what they were predicting.

I feel weird being disgusted by some of the game, because that reaction veers so close to the moral panics surrounding the GTA series that get wielded against video games as a whole. On the plus side, it also makes the current conservative backlash to GTA VI even more hilarious. GTA looms so large in the public imagination, and is so weight-bearing to the current video game industry, that it’s hard to experience V for the first time just as itself, to not read so much into every billboard and radio spot and activity and character.

There’s so much more of it that I need to experience before I can really understand what it is and what it’s doing. But with all the baggage around it, and with what I’ve seen so far when I get too close to the game’s core, I’m not totally sure that I want to. I’ve had more fun just exploring the world, even as I keep brushing against things I think are closed to me until I advance more of the plot. I want to open up all the secrets and mysteries that Zack’s stories made sound so enticing, even as I’m worried what I might find there. GTA V is a strange game to come to without any nostalgia; I’m not quite sure if I’m enjoying it, or what it could look like to enjoy it for the first time in 2026. I would really like to get far enough to buy a better bicycle, though.