GTA’s radio shows show Rockstar is a DJ

I love that feeling when you’re in a car, your head full of plans and worries, chatting — and then an unexpected song comes on the radio and everything changes. For the next few minutes, all plans are forgotten, all worries are pushed aside. Suddenly everyone in the car is silent and locked in their own inner world, hypnotized by the music and the landscape and the simple power of momentum.

That kind of experience is a big part of the magic of having the radio on while driving. And it’s part of the magic of having the radio on while driving in Grand Theft Auto . Even from the earliest games, with their simple top-down cities, these games understood that music shouldn’t just reinforce an existing tone or emphasize a mission you’re already in. Instead, they understand that sometimes the radio needs to sweep you away. Sometimes it needs to pull you right out of your current agenda or your emerging plan, and leave you hanging in the music and the environment and the new mood that’s suddenly been created.

This has been my theory for years anyway, and I recently revisited it. GTA 5 to try it again. My wife, who is a GTA 5 superfan, went to the game with me when we stole a car and drove through the streets of Los Santos, she helped me dodge some cops and then we turned on the radio.

Listen. Years ago, my mother told us that there was only one radio station in Los Angeles, and by that she meant KMET, the muddled home of progressive rock. We kids were young then, and we took her very literally when she said this, even though all she meant was that she always wanted to be within arm’s reach to listen to “Baker Street” while navigating traffic. Fast forward almost four decades, and I’ll tell you this: There’s only one radio station in Los Santos. It’s Non-Stop Pop. I get what my mother meant: This is the only station that matters.

There are bubblegum hits and glittering deep cuts here, all served up by DJ Cara — voiced by Cara Delevingne — who comes in semi-regularly to drop inspirational bon mots like, “What are you saving your money for? Buy a drum kit!” Non-Stop Pop is the best radio station in Los Santos, and that’s for exactly the reasons I’ve been talking about: the music plays out on GTA‘s design as often as it fits neatly into the grooves.

Case in point. With the police far behind us and the road leading north, my wife suggested we park at a beach and go swimming with the whales. A perfect plan. We looked for a turnoff, but then came Dirty Vegas. Morning came, which was the perfect time to listen to the dripping, bubbling cavern called “Days Go By.” It felt as if both our minds had been erased at once. No talking. No ambitions. Just Braddock Pass to Mount Chiliad and us in our car, gliding through the mineral wind of a new morning as this almost forgotten song played and the sky turned a brilliant pearl blue.

But it wasn’t over yet. Then on the radio came “Pure Shores” by All Saints, which took us almost all the way to Paleto Bay, completely forgetting all thoughts of whales. Everything was forgotten: we were empty-headed, nostalgic, slightly wistful. And all this in a game that often involves robbing banks and running over security guards.

Image: Rockstar Games

Moments like these are GTA to the core, but they’re GTA when it’s trying to recognize the magic power of trashy radio. This magic isn’t complicated. It often comes down to picking a song you’d never consider putting on, in a situation where you’d never want to hear it, but somehow it still manages to create these little moments of perfection.

Perfection can take strange forms. Minutes out of Paleto Bay, we drove a stolen minivan into the deadly military base off the map just as Gorillaz were coming on and DJ Cara was warning us that we were all doomed to irrelevance. Five minutes later, I accidentally pancaked an entire street gang going about their business in the fake LA river in Los Santos when the universe decided an old Wham! song should accompany our escape through drainage canals under a giant crescent moon.

Creating these kinds of effects, through chance and the effortless familiarity of yesterday’s hits, takes time and money. Time and money are among Rockstar’s superpowers, which explains why this sort of thing happens more often in GTA than anywhere else. As a result, radio has always felt like GTA at its most luxurious. Radio is rarely a bullet point on a box, but it makes these games feel like part of the world we already live in.

I can’t even imagine how much GTA 5‘s budget went to radio. There are so many stations, all lavishly conceived. As well as Non-Stop Pop, there’s the likes of Radio Mirror Park, which my wife describes as the perfect music to get high to, and Rebel Radio, which oozes country. There’s West Coast Talk Radio and Blaine County Radio, whose incessant chatter mixes conspiracy theories with bunker-building tips and fond Y2K memories, with the result being eerily realistic. There’s hours of this, and someone had to write it all, and someone had to record it. In the past, actors like Juliette Lewis have hosted shows on GTA Radio, and that’s before you get to music licensing. Why spend so much money on something that’s going to disappear the moment you decide to play the game on mute?

I have a theory. Coupled with radio’s peculiar ability to transport and reorient you as you drive, and the fact that American talk radio was unwittingly satirizing the modern world long before Rockstar even tried, I suspect there’s a deeper synergy at work. I suspect that radio and GTA belong together because commercial radio does many of the same things that GTA’s designers did. It compresses, remixes, and curates shared experiences.

Rockstar codified modern open-world game design, but these days the developer is often a DJ rather than a composer. The studio shuffles, re-enacts and reframes themes, scenes and archetypes that already exist in popular culture. That goes for gunfights and mafia movies, and it goes for cities. GTA 5 is a beautiful reconstruction of popular ideas about Los Angeles — a lot of different, sometimes conflicting popular ideas. Smoggy cocktail-pink sunsets, the PCH, Nakatomi Plaza, the spendthrifts of Beverly Hills, even that weird gift shop outside the LA County coroner’s office — it all gets broken down, polished, and glued back together in an endless curated loop as you spiral from street to street, mission to mission.

Isn’t this as much the work of a DJ as it is of a video game world builder? Yes, GTA boils down the street maps and hits the thesaurus for the funny names, but it also takes your favorite mental images of LA or Miami and puts them together like a DJ would. In fact, by focusing on DJs and how they work with music and memory to create a mood, you perhaps get the best sense of what Rockstar thinks the job of the game designer is. Rockstar wants to give you something you already know, but do it in a way that feels so alive and panoramic and kinetic that you’ll always see it as the studio presented it from that moment on. Rockstar wants to watermark the vistas that already exist in your head.

So. Do people still listen to the radio these days? Sure, but probably not as much as they did when my mom was on KMET. Radio is competing with Spotify, Audible, and social media. I think you see that in GTA. When the trailer came out for GTA 6I was fascinated to see the best remixers in video games at it again. And look at the memes and video clips and scrolling comment sections as alligators walked through convenience stores and bewildered women walked around with hammers.

Rockstar clearly has its eyes on TikTok as much as it does on great Florida crime stories. TikTok, after all, feels like the most radio-like of social media platforms. Here’s a grim world of beauty and chaos and endlessly reorienting distraction. It’s both familiar and surprising, and you never get around to it.