It had the potential, basically, to spread. Vice City was discomfortingly lacking moral fibre, but also impossible to ignore, since it had the cultural certificates of high production value, celebrity involvement and popularity. If it touched the nerves of social and art critics, it was because, perhaps for the first time, traditional video game grossness was receiving filmic credibility. Vice City wasn't just gratuitously violent, it was expensively-produced.
It was a place held together and made beautiful by violence, where you desired to be.Ĭirca 2002, when videogames were still culturally fringe, an idiosyncratic pastime rarely confluent with mainstream musical or celebrity names, the presence of songs and voices you recognised redoubled this effect. It wasn't just a place where violence paid. As well as benefiting some rich gangsters, a mathematical correlation between violence and success apparently made Vice City a kind of paradise, capable of giving you your nostalgia fix. They were voiced by Dennis Hopper, Lee Majors and Danny Dyer you played as Ray Liotta from Goodfellas. And the people with whom you pulled jobs – your in-world friends – were pop culture icons. The radio stations you listened to played one hit after another all 80s killer, no filler. Your cars in Vice City were all low-suspension sports models you'd seen before on aspirational TV shows, like Miami Vice or Starsky and Hutch. That's why Vice City was controversial, because it carried a truly amoral message: the more bad things you do, the more good you receive.Īnd the world founded on that precept – the world where killing equalled material and personal enrichment – also made that world look cool. Violence committed (v) is proportional (∝) to money and status earned (m) So to say Grand Theft Auto "glamorises" or "sensationalises" violence, when all violence apportioned you were the tools to commit more violence, was inaccurate. 3D, yes, but set in a rainy, American East Coast shit-hole, where the only things you could buy were sex workers and guns. Grand Theft Auto III was similarly sullen. On the contrary, GTA 1's top-down, heavily-pixelated aesthetic leaves it, next to, say, DOOM, Postal or the other "nasties" of the era, looking comparatively tame. Although it awards you money or "points" in exchange for kills – and the more destruction you cause, the further you tend to advance – that hardly differentiates from or makes it more shocking than tens of thousands of other games.
But really, those criticisms are hard to take all that seriously. Since its first game in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has been accused, more or less constantly, of glamorising violence. This post is part of VICE's 15th anniversary series, presented by VANS
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