NARCO PIERRE WHITE
Go on Rockstar, give us Chinatown Wars on crack – or whatever drugs sell these days
“It’s easy to imagine your car becoming your storefront as a drug dealer, stuffed with wares.”
Of the many rumours surrounding GTA VI, one has persisted in the public imagination – not because it’s credible, necessarily, but because it sounds brilliant. It suggests that Rockstar’s next opus will return to Vice City, just as GTA V did to San Andreas, but that player time will be split between two Americas: a parodic take on Miami, and a new city based on Rio de Janeiro.
It’s a pitch that has the ring of, if not truth, then certainly sense. Given comments the Housers have made in the past, we’re unlikely ever to see a GTA game without one foot in the US; leaving the place entirely would mean either abandoning the series’ satirical bent or punching down at a country less fortunate. Yet devoting half the game to an unfamiliar landscape offers opportunities to introduce truly fresh themes and mechanics – and Rockstar is a creatively hungry company.
Those mechanics are said to be inspired by Narcos, and hinge on the drug trade, asking you to build an empire by controlling the flow of merchandise into the US. My hope is that they’re a way for Rockstar to finally deliver on a heavily systemic vision of GTA, one that blends the strictly scripted missions of the past with a more dynamic, player-driven path through the world.
SHARK TALE
The groundwork is already there, if you know where to look. Vice City’s story, of course, was structured around the purchase of businesses all over town – fronts for your cocaine kingdom that boasted unique mission threads, allowing Rockstar to present its set-pieces in non-linear fashion. But the handheld followup, Vice City Stories, went one further. There, Rockstar Leeds combined those existing property mechanics with the gang territory disputes of San Andreas, creating a complex system for taking control of the map. At any time you could initiate an attack on a rival outfit, killing their goons and damaging their property, so that you could buy it on the cheap once the dust had settled.
Owned properties could be set up as dodgy businesses, and performed better if they were located in a spot appropriate for the activity: a base for smuggling, for instance, would bring
1 Imagine you could open this boot, and it was filled with, erm, product. 2 Vice City is fresh in the public memory after the remasters – and still very well loved.
in more daily moolah if set up near the docks or airport. Crucially, the mechanics cut both ways. Gangs you went to war with would attack and damage your properties in turn, hitting you where it hurt most: your wallet. Even if you refused to engage in gang wars, they’d play out in the streets around disputed buildings; Bikers fighting Cholos, Sharks fighting Bikers.
TRADE WAR
Rockstar Leeds infused Chinatown Wars with the same systemic spirit, encouraging you to push drugs all over Liberty City. You’d buy heroin or acid low and attempt to sell it high, travelling across town to find a buyer
“Managing a drug empire could be an interesting side-hustle to GTA VI’s main storyline. Introducing a sleek trading system alongside the rest of GTA’s bombastic chaos could be the surprising switch up the series needs. Rachel Watts
who would offer you better than market value. Best of all was the way this trade system fed into GTA’s traditional mechanics. Stuffing your holdall full of coke was a conscious risk, made in the knowledge that it could all be confiscated if you were busted.
These self-set objectives were largely abandoned by the mainline GTA games, but I’d love to see them exhumed and expanded in a setting like Rio de Janeiro. There are unconfirmed whispers of a car that functions a little like Red Dead Redemption 2’s horse, acting as a storage trunk as you drive around the map. It’s easy to imagine that car becoming your storefront as a drug dealer, stuffed with wares you stand to lose if you’re not careful.
ELITE TIER
There is an appetite for this sort of thing at the highest levels of Rockstar management. Sam Houser, the company president, who has exercised huge creative influence over the GTA games since the ’90s, loved
Elite as a boy, playing the starship trading game as a “space mugger”. Now is the time to indulge that influence. Giving players responsibility for their decisions as the owner of illegitimate businesses would be a great antidote to the rigid mission structure for which GTA has long been criticised. In an age when rival open-world creators like Ubisoft are leaning increasingly on simulation and reactive systems to push the form forward, GTA VI could be the perfect platform to blast them all out of the water – with bags and bags of top-quality blow. Jeremy Peel