GTA games come alive when you turn on the radio

Something surprising happened when we sat down last week to write about what we wanted to see more of in Grand Theft Auto 6. Two of us, independently, wanted to write about radio stations. If you've read the piece you'll know that Ed wrote a lovely section on his need for an 80s radio station to bring him the perfect Miami vibes. I was going to write about Non-Stop-Pop and its host DJ Cara. (Ed's piece was so good in the end I found some other bobbins to write about.)

Maybe it's not surprising that more than one of us wanted to write about the radio. Radio has been a part of GTA since the very beginning, after all. I can remember very clearly sitting in my rented room in the year after university, playing the first GTA on my PC and racing wildly over the city looking for the perfect car - not the perfect car for a crime or a mission, but the perfect car for the selection of tunes it played. Radio stations were broken up by vehicle back then - anyone who scored a pick-up truck and had to listen to the since country song looping will know this intimately. It worked, though, because you felt like you were stealing a car and having to live with the previous owner's radio presets. You were living with the ghost of their musical taste.

Scroll forward to the present and I can't imagine GTA without radio. The radio wheel is as important - more important maybe - than the weapon wheel whenever I watch my wife playing. Weapons are fine for changing the balance or approach in a gunfight, sure, but the right radio station dictates the entire mood of a play session. Radio is its own way of being in this world.

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