Crime. Man and woman. Crime. Fast cars. Crime. Guns and robberies. More crime. Am I talking about GTA 6 or Baby Driver? Well, both, I hope.
Here’s the thing: it’s very easy to have that be the only takeaway – but there’s more to it. I promise. Keep reading. I want GTA 6 to replicate the kind of storytelling that comes from something like Baby Driver, and Rockstar has kind of already done that with Red Dead Redemption 2. Not that Red Dead Redemption 2 is anything like Baby Driver, but… I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
I Hope GTA 6 Harlem Shuffles Its Way Into My Heart
Okay, lock in. GTA 5 had a story, sure. Bank robberies, a flashy world, and the trio of the new kid, ‘back in the game’ older man, and haha funny guy who screams a lot. I played it, I liked it, but it didn’t break any sort of ground outside of financial achievement. As a result of this middling feeling, I almost didn’t pick up RDR2 when it arrived in 2018 because I didn’t want just a ‘big bad cowboy goes bang bang’ game. I mean, even the trailers didn’t really do much to sell it as more than this.
But it turns out, RDR2 actually has the best video game story ever written, and the best video game characters ever written. Hell, maybe even just the best characters, period. It was something that explored much more than a glorified life of crime, by showing us the wildly varying humans behind it, their fears, how they changed, and the effects they had on each other.
So where does Baby Driver come into this conversation? Not naturally. I love the film and am purely forcing it into this article, but you better believe I’ll do it with heart. Baby Driver tells the story of a young man who has been trapped in a life of crime from an even younger age than Arthur Morgan. He’s good at it, one of the best, but he doesn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
He meets a young woman and they fall in love. Are you still with me? After this, he settles his debt and should therefore be free to leave and set his life straight. But uh oh, big bad man says no. It’s really not the most complex of tales, and I love the simplicity in it, but my biggest takeaway is: crime sucks.
Surely We Can All Agree Crime Is Just… Mostly Not Great, Right?
To this end, a GTA game played as a good guy would be no fun, right? The most riveting bit of gameplay would be filing an insurance claim after it was your own car that got stolen, and while I love tedious games, I wouldn’t take it that far. What I want, somewhere in between, is to see crime as the big, terrifying beast it is. I’m not 13, I don’t think it’s cool anymore.
It’s all too real that so many young people are pulled into this world, whether from indoctrination, blackmail, or whether they feel there are no other options for them. It’s a horrible thing, and something I feel Baby Driver represented incredibly well amidst its layers of style and showmanship.
After Rockstar broke not only its own mold but the industry standard of storytelling with RDR2, I know that it could tell a meaningful story around these themes, using a medium as big as GTA. I mean, is there any game as big or as significant as this, regardless of where on the gamer scale you fall?
There’s even a small clip in GTA 6’s reveal trailer that reminds me of Baby Driver in other ways. Maybe it’s just because it’s the two characters in a car with music blasting. Shut up.
The first and only GTA 6 trailer we’ve received so far was from over a year ago, and this doesn’t do much to give away any story elements. I’m glad it doesn’t, but it leaves no room for us to imagine what the game could be about. The only bits of the main characters we see present them in a nonchalant-about-crime way, which worries me. But then Red Dead 2’s trailers did the same thing, and I was happily proven wrong about that. Maybe I will be here. I hope I am.
I just want GTA to mean something. I want the writers to do what they do best. I don’t want gold-plated cars and high-octane violence. I want the anxiety of escaping alive, the reluctance to be involved in the first place, and characters I can honestly, truly root for. RDR2 gave me this close-knit family of humans, while GTA 5 gave me a trio of stereotypes. I’m crossing my fingers for GTA 6, but I won’t know how to feel until it’s in my hands.