<![CDATA[Comedy]]>

I remember booting up Grand Theft Auto 2 on the original Playstation when I was a kid. The top-down sandbox shooter was something of a revelation for young Brandon who would proceed to spend hours committing heinous crimes for crime lords all over a city. Being the bad guy in a city where everyone was pretty awful was far more fun than it had any right to be. Even listening to the radio in the car you stole was great since radio shows and DJs would only add to the feeling of the world you were causing mayhem and destruction in.

It was absolutely irreverent and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Fast forward to just a couple of years later and Rockstar Games would release Grand Theft Auto 3. “Mind blowing” doesn’t begin to cover it. They had done away with the top-down view in order to embrace a 3rd-person 3-D world where an entire city (known as Liberty City) was literally your playground. Steal a car, collect weapons, explore the city, gun down anyone and everyone for no reason at all, pick up prostitutes and generally cause havoc on a scale hitherto unexperienced in the gaming world.

What’s more, the environment was alive. You could stand on a street corner and do absolutely nothing and things would transpire around you from a passer-by saying something ridiculous to an entire firefight between cops and robbers. What’s more, Liberty City wasn’t just a chaotic place where criminals reigned supreme. It was its only little universe of satire, irreverence, and a complete absence of political correctness.

Many games would go on to adopt that anything-goes sandbox playstyle but Grand Theft Auto would stand out as the king of them all, and it’s, in part, because of that universe.

GTA was a game that mastered satirization. It didn’t matter who you were, where you came from, or what you believed, chances are you were going to find yourself the butt of a joke in the game. Rich, poor, black, white, Republican, or Democrat, you were up to be lampooned in some way, shape, or form. It’s that irreverence in action and thought that made the game so much fun to play.

This masterclass in video game making would continue all the way into Grand Theft Auto 5, a game so vast and so in-depth that I’ve played it on and off for years and I’m still pretty sure I haven’t gotten down to the bottom of it. It’s so good, in fact, that it needs to be noted that this game came out in 2013 and Rockstar has been successfully milking it ever since.

For those who never have, or never will play a Grand Theft Auto title, it’s hard to express how fun these games are. What I can express to you, though, is how important the games were to our culture.

Some of you are probably reading this article and wondering why I’m heaping so much praise on a game that was labeled as one of the evilest and most dangerous titles ever released. To be sure, when GTA 3 was released, a barrage of pearl-clutching occurred in our society with the media warning everyone and anyone who would listen that this game is teaching kids to be robbers, gangsters, and mass murderers. Hillary Clinton herself attempted to ban violent video games with Rockstar Games being at the center of her crosshairs.

Did GTA cause children to become violent criminals? The easy answer is “no.” I’m one of the billions who have played the title at some iteration and to say that the game caused my generation to become violent is laughable. Just like they said D&D and movies like Scarface would turn people who watched it into raving lunatics, GTA provided a place to escape to, a place that laughed at the world you escaped from.

I tell you all of this because I wanted you, dear reader, to understand what GTA actually was without interference from the media, politicians, and pearl-clutching Karens. These games are definitely not for kids. They’re immoral and no one in these games is a model citizen worthy of being imitated…but they’re fun. They don’t adhere to modern “morality,” in fact, the games constantly spit in its face and that’s a good thing. It demolished sacred cows and mocked the self-important shallowness our society continues to obsess itself with.

Like South Park, below its disgusting exterior was unrestrained commentary that could be considered refreshing and fun. Something we need more of now than we ever had before.

Which makes the fact that the news that it’s going woke all the more terrible.

As reported by Bounding Into Comics, Rockstar’s rockstars have more or less left the company and now it’s being run by the same people that Rockstar games used to make fun of:

After the death of George Floyd and subsequent riots, the studio allegedly halted plans for their Cops ‘n’ Crooks mode for Grand Theft Auto Online. Senior executives were concerned how releasing such a mode — where teams of players fought against each other in teams of police and criminals — would be taken at that time.

Noting that Rockstar Games had also censored allegedly transphobic content from the latest console release of Grand Theft Auto V, the outlet reports the studio had also “significantly narrowed its gender pay gap.”

It gets worse as Bounding Into Comics reported:

Rockstar Games may also be trying not to “punch down” with jokes about marginalized groups, the source claims, in contrast to prior games. While prior titles had seemingly mocked American society as a whole — with no holds bared against any group — the outlet notes how Grand Theft Auto V’s tone was a mirror to the behavior of Rockstar Games employees.

The company that made a name off of demolishing sacred cows has now begun to embrace them, ceding one more cultural goliath to the woke.

You might not be a gamer, but you probably know this story by now as you’ve watched something you loved get devoured by woke culture. Whether it’s football, NASCAR, your favorite genre of music, movie franchises, or something else, you’ve experienced the fall of it to social justice radicalism.

But Rockstar Games was supposed to be one of those fortresses that stood against this stuff. It was a juggernaut of anti-political correctness that could always be relied upon to say the things we couldn’t say in polite society. It used absurd caricatures to point out very real absurdities about people and groups.

Now, we can probably kiss all that goodbye.

It’s a sad thing to see, but it’s just one more reason to hate woke culture and despise the people who push it on us.