MAY

This month I'm going to be doing something slightly different and instead of droning on and on about what I did last month I'm going to be droning on and on about something I did for the last twelve years. So forget everything you think you know about GTA: Online because it's actually a really complex and deep multi-layered experiment in social interation, and yes, I am serious.

GTA ONLINE: A RETROSPECTIVE

Or

My Love Letter to a really complex and deep multi-layered experiment in social interaction.

On the 15th of May my Playstation Plus subscription ran out. Unlike previous years when this had happened, I didn't renew it. I'm currently in the process of moving house and my life is upside down, but if even when I did have the time to log into GTA: Online I barely played it.

Somehow the game has lost its charm. I don't know if it's the fact that most of the player base has left, or if the recent DLCs have been kind of uninspiring, or if it's because I already own everything in the game, or if it's just my age (I was 43 when I started playing it and I'm now 56). Maybe it's a combination of all these things. Whatever the reason, on the 14th of May 2026 I logged in for the final time, took one of my old supercars from its garage, drove it into the sunset, closed the application and deleted it.

GTA: Online has been a game like no other, and I have poured well over a year of my life into it according to the stats, so it felt odd to just leave it without some kind of 'goodbye'. There will no doubt be another online version of GTA along with the new game, but it will be different, because I will be different.

So here it is; my farewell to GTA: Online. A collection of recollections, memoirs and reflections on a game that was loved and hated, perfect and flawed, fun and frustrating but most of all extraordinary and unforgettable.

I. HISTORY

Before there was GTA: Online there was Grand Theft Auto. It sounds obvious, but increasingly there are players around who have no idea where the origins of the game came from. I played the original demo of Grand Theft Auto, at the house of my friend's brother, who was a car thief. That wasn't such an unusual thing in the mid-nineties.

Back then the UK had a huge car theft problem. Youths, or most often children (who were too young to be prosecuted), would steal cars for the sole purpose of 'joy riding'. The official term was Taken Without Consent, which led to the term TWOCers. There was even a road on an estate in Leicester where it was so common that it was known by the police as 'TWOC alley'.

So when news that a video game was going to be released in 1997 called Grand Theft Auto it caused the British media to go crazy. The publicity didn't do any harm to sales of the game however, and controversy has followed GTA through its many iterations.

1997 was also the year the internet started to gain popularity. Online games became mainstream, rather than the preserve of organised groups of computer nerds using a LAN (local area network). One of the games I played at the time was called Interstate '76 and it had an online feature. As someone who had spent thier life up to this point playing games on my own the idea of being in a simulated reality with other people totally blew my mind. This was cyberspace made real!

Even with a simple modem of the day there could be multiple players in the same session, driving around shooting at one another. The interesting thing though was that players would sometimes stop fighting and just chill, showing off their cars or just driving around.

When GTA IV released in 2008 it was the first GTA game to feature a multiplayer mode. The mode featured races, deathmatches and other games like Cops n' Crooks, co-operative missions and Mafiya Work, where players competed to complete objectives for someone called Petrovic. Team Mafiya Work was a variant where players formed groups to compete against one another and after the races and missions, this was my favourite mode.

I learned pretty quickly from playing online that I was a lousy shot. If there hadn't been auto-aim in the single player mode I'd probably have never finished the game, but I didn't let that put me off. I knew from competing in races that I was an above average driver, so reasoned that a team with a competent wheelman might have an advantage over one that did not. For me a car was better than a gun if you wanted not to avoid getting shot (and they were useful for taking cover behind too).

Another reason that I gravitated towards team games was to watch the other players. I was fascinated by the ways they played the game, and how they dealt with the hostile enviroment. The more I watched, the more I began to think about strategy. I started to think about defensive and diversionary tactics and ways to achieve the objectives without engaging directly with the enemy. Then I discovered helicopters.

No one I had played with in any of the Team Mafiya games had ever thought to use a helicopter, mainly because you had to travel all the way over to the third island to pick it up, but the advantages if your team had one were huge. The first few times I used a heli in TMW it didn't work out too well and the other team members got mad that I wasn't helping them. When certain objectives came up though it was possible to land on them before any of the other teams had even arrived.

Transporting other players was also very useful, there were no parachutes in GTA IV though so it was often necessary to drop them on rooftops as rotorblades and lamp posts aren't a good combination. Flying around Liberty City was not without its risks, and I got especially skilled at flying between buildings, but then there was always the rocket launcher. A well aimed shot from an RPG could take out a helicopter, though the aircraft were surprisingly resistant to gunfire. You could also land on health pickups to fix the heli (a feature that sadly wasn't carried over to GTA Online). I carried on playing GTA IV Multiplayer until GTA V came out and was even inspired to go and get a helicopter licence in real life!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olEGtoYs_8A

II. EARLY DAYS

When GTA: Online launched in October 2013 it's fair to say that it was not a smooth and pleasant gaming experience. Many times the server would crash, mainly because there actually weren't any servers and the game relied on players hosting sessions to each other. It was so bad that Rockstar gave out $500,000 of in game currency to everyone a couple of months later as a way of saying sorry. (I used my $500k to buy a Monroe).

I was just disappointed that my favourite game mode wasn't in there and more than a little upset that they'd changed the controls for helicopters which meant I'd have to learn to fly them all over again. I didn't have to wait too long to buy a heli though as the first of many 'exploits' was soon to arrive; namely the 'Lester Bounty money glitch'. I don't know exactly how this worked, but it had something to do with injecting packets into the servers (or something) so that the bounty set on another player by Lester could be for billions of dollars, instead of the usual 10,000 maximum. Players could then claim the bounty and share the cash with everyone in the lobby. Everyone was just handing out cash and I got up to about 500 million dollars at one point, enough to buy everything in the game, including the Buzzard.

The glitch was quickly patched and all of the money wiped, but purchases weren't affected. I was then able to use my Buzzard in contact missions, which were the main activity in the game at the time. Like GTA IV Multiplayer, there was a Freemode where players could wander around the main map, shooting each other and running each other over, but there were also several game modes. Deathmatches, racing and contact missions were the main way to make money.

Contact Missions were an evolution of the co-op missions that had been in Read Dead Redemption's Multiplayer mode. I liked them because they involved multiple players but weren't Player vs Player (PvP). Of course, that didn't mean that the other players were trying to help you. You could always spot the people who were the PvPers because they couldn't change their mindset to actually playing as a team. To me the team dynamic was the most interesting.

I didn't think that playing the same mission over and over again would be that interesting, but despite being a set series of objectives and tasks, no mission was ever the same twice. It was like seeing the same Shakespeare play many times with different actors; knowing what was coming next made the differences more obvious. Every group of players approached things differently and even if it was the same group of players each time something would happen to change how the mission went.

I liked exploring the limits of the missions and finding ways to break them. For example, you could collect a mission critial object and never deliver it, postponing the end of the mission indefinitely. The other players couldn't kill you because they were on the same team, so the only option they had was to quit. There were other loopholes which could make the mission quicker to complete, like stealing all the cars in the mission GTA Today before the first objective was complete.

I also tried to incorporate helicopters into any mission I was in, and was surprised that the game design was so robust enough to still be enjoyable. For the mission The Los Santos Connection I could pick up my heli from the hospital right next to the spawn point and then use it to provide air support for the ground team. When the Savage was introduced this was even better for clearing out areas with lots of enemies, and it was always pretty cool to pick people up and fly into the airport with them before blasting the hangar with explosive cannons.

Contact missions were also a great way to meet people, and you could tell pretty quickly who the good players were. The best player I ever met in the game was named Samerkiv. They played as a female character, and had an uncanny ability to know exactly what I was thinking at any given time during a mission. If I dropped them onto a rooftop they would leap out straight away and fight the enemies on the ground. When they had the objective they would already been heading to the extraction point before I'd landed. I could make a running landing next to them and they'd be on board in seconds, while other players would get confused about what I was trying to do, or even steal the helicopter from me and crash it into the nearest building.

Of course Contact Missions were just as open to abuse as every other mode and anyone who was around at the time will remember grinding Rooftop Rumble for hours on end to get cash. Eventually, over a year after the initial release of GTA: Online, the much anticipated Heists DLC came out and the game changed forever.

III. HEISTS

Heists had been a core part of the single player game, and that were also a major part of all the previous games. Every major GTA title had featured a bank job, but GTA V built its main story around several well planned heists. When GTA: Online launched it was supposed to include a multiplayer version of the heists, but the feature was delayed. Rockstar said that the heists update was being delayed but didn't give a date for when they'd be released. What we eventually got, over a year later, was worth the wait though.

The Heists dlc built on the single player content, adding another dimension with complex setup missions that led to a grand finale. There were five heists, and each one had a different theme. The finales and the setups often featured individual roles for each player. For example, the Prison Break heist required a pilot to fly the light aircraft that would pick up the escaped prisoner, a demolitions expert to steal the prison bus and destroy it, before collecting a helicopter that would later be used to provide support and extraction of the heist team. Meanwhile another two players would pose as guard and prisoner so they could infiltrate the prison to collect the prisoner.

Though the actual missions themselves felt a lot like Contact Missions, they were much harder and required a team of four competent players. Unlike Contact Missions, if anyone left the session or died the job would fail, and this alone made the heists and their set-ups extremely frustrating. It was more important than ever to find a good crew and I remember making a lot of friends during this time.

Live chat was almost essential for doing the setups and heists and though I didn't really like having the player mics on, I did enjoy a lot of the sessions where we were all together playing and talking. For me, it took away slightly from the immersion of the game hearing the voices of real people, and I've always preferred non-verbal communication anyway, but when it all came together with four people working as a team to pull off an audacious heist, it was magical. The early days of Heists were probably the peak GTA: Online experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlOVYVV8pGg&t=259s

Sometime in 2014 I began to think that I was missing out on some of the content in the game because my character was male. This meant that all the new clothes for female characters which came with each dlc weren't available to me, so I created a new character. I decided that 'Jane' would be my main character's sister, who had heard about what a lovely place Los Santos was and had decided to move there.

It turned out that both characters shared the same bank account, so Jane was able to immediately buy herself an apartment, some clothes and new car. I decided that she liked convertibles and boats, and one day would like to live by the sea (for now she'd live up near Vinewood). Jane would also have everything opposite to her brother, since there seemed no point making both characters the same. She had a Nightshark instead of an Insurgent, a Savage instead of a Buzzard and a Zentorno instead of a Turismo R.

When the business dlcs started to come out the opposites rule applied there as well. My main character had bought the office and cargo warehouse so Jane had the biker business (she was more interested in motorbikes than her brother anyway). While the main character had the bunker from the Gunrunning dlc, Jane got the hangar from the Smuggler's Run dlc.

Sometimes I disregarded the opposites rule and gave both characters the same thing; they both had a yacht and a facility. It got to the point where the playstyle of each character became very different, as each new business started to work with the previous ones. For the After Hours dlc both characters had different nightclubs to run, but because Jane had the biker businesses she was able to do smaller deliveries more frequently. The main character on the other hand, with a bunker and the cargo warehouses, would sit on his stock until it filled up and then he did one big delivery.

It was interesting how small decisions made a difference later on as GTA: Online evolved. I would have to think differently as well about game modes like CEO and VIP work based on what vehicles I did or did not have available to me. Also, when I got bored with the game, I could switch characters and suddenly everything seemed totally different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n83Szp7pFr8

IV. CEO WORK WITH RANDOMS

As my criminal empire started to grow I found myself running out of things to buy, and things to do. Around that time I noticed that a lot of new players were joining the game as well, and soon I was meeting people who were asking me for advice about what business to buy and the best way to make money. For the new players coming into the game the amount of choice they now had was overwhelming, and the purchase price for these properties was in the millions.

These new players could also be fresh meat for the more experienced players like me who were tooled up with all the best gear. I know from experience that some of those new players left the game after a few weeks, so I decided to try and help a few of them get started.

Usually on a Saturday morning I would go to my office, start a stream called 'CEO Work With Randoms' and send out invitations. There would be a few people who'd turn up and I'd recruit them into my organisation and run jobs. I played the game for fun, but also tried to pick freemode activities that would be entertaining for the viewers (not that I had any) and the players.

I would start out by piling everyone into a helicopter from the office and then I'd usually start Plowed. In this game one player drives a big truck with a huge metal scoop on the front and has to smash up crates at three different locations. It was a good test mission as it invariably drew out all the griefers in the session and I was able to see which of my new 'associates' were good at defending themselves. I always let one of the other players drive the truck while I stayed in the helicopter and watched out for incoming threats.

The truck itself had a signal jammer and was very heavily armoured against explosives. Most of the players I was recruiting however were low level and wouldn't have known what was going on. About a third of the time the mission failed when someone on an Opressor Mk II showed up and took out the truck. A lot of the time the low level player would get stuck on a piece of scenery and become an easy target. Occassionally we'd find a high level griefer who just wouldn't leave us alone and then I would have to decide whether to chage sessions or run another job that gave us more of a defensive advantage.

Piracy Prevention was a freemode job that involved defending the Galaxy Super Yacht. My usual M.O. was get myself to the yacht somehow and then invite everybody to it. Once I had three or four of my own bodyguards there I'd exit onto the deck and start the job. Any persistent griefers would fly directly towards us and face the onslaught. If they managed to capture the yacht then I wasn't too upset, putting it down to a failure on our part. Usually they discover that they'd made a mistake as they got spawn trapped on the yacht to be gunned down by all four of us.

With my second character the procedure was slightly different as Jane didn't have an office, though I did get her one later when the Contracts DLC came out. As a biker gang she could recruit upto eight members, though she couldn't do any of the CEO/VIP missions or the ones associated with vehicle warehouse like Plowed. Usually Jane would run hangar supply misisons, which all involved flying. She could also do biker jobs and later on the Mercenaries missions.

In both cases it was a constant battle to keep dealing with the griefers and tryhards, and just like GTA IV there were multiple strategies available. With each dlc and update there were changes to freemode and the vehicles available. The game constantly evolved and one strategy would become obsolete as new ones opened up.

In 2018 though, the game would change forever.

V. BROOMSTICKS, GRIEFERS & TRYHARDS

It was the Gunrunning dlc in 2017 that introduced the first Oppressor, a winged motorbike with top-tier homing rockets. This vehicle quickly became the weapon of choice for griefers as it allowed them to move over the map very quickly, avoiding terrain and obstacles and striking without warning with deadly explosive missiles. That was nothing compared to the next variant however, which launched with the After Hours DLC in 2018.

When the Oppressor Mk II was announced everyone knew it would be much worse than the Oppressor Mk I, but nobody could have predicted just how bad things would get. Along with the Deluxo, which had been introduced as part of the Doomsday Heist, freemode was becoming a nightmare. Both the Deluxo and Oppressor Mk II had hover capabilities, which went against everything the original GTA: Online had been. Suddenly the realism and immersion of the game had been thrown out of the window, but worst of all these vehicles rendered all aircraft obsolete.

My favourite part of the game, flying around in helicopters, was now becoming impossible. Any level of skill with aircraft was irrelevant as the homing missiles on these vehicles were impossible to dodge. The 'broomstick' took zero skill to operate and taking out other players in vehicles and aircraft could be achieved with the press of a button. The reason that Rockstar had done this was obvious; money.

To get the Oppressor Mk II and upgrade its weapon to the homing rockets you needed a Terrorbyte, and the only way to get a Terrorbyte was to but a nightclub. All of that combined cost millions, but that didn't seem to stop the swathes of new players, some of whom had purchased modded accounts, from swarming every freemode session.

Strategically these flying bikes were a disaster. The only way to combat them was with another Oppressor Mk II and I hated the fact that I had sink to their level to fight them. Even then it was a crapshoot, with countermeasures like chaff needing to be carefully timed so that a shot could be fired at the attacker before they could shoot you. When running sell missions, the best you could really do against these tryhards was keep them busy long enough to in the hope that the cargo would get to its destination in the meantime.

In the years that followed there were many nerfs to the Oppressor Mk II to make it less OP, and the bug which made them fly faster than intended was patched as well. It had always been my hope that some other vehicle or system would come along to make the Mk II obsolete, afterall the game was constantly evolving, but nothing ever did. To this day the Oppressor Mk II is still the thing that ruins most game sessions, and even if you manage to take one out there will always be five more to take their place.

The only sure fire strategy that I ever found to combat the Oppressor Mk II was the CEO job Fully Loaded. This freemode mission involved using a Ruiner 2000 with a lock on jammer, extremely though armour and an unlimited supply of top tier rockets. The mission lasted twenty minutes, and you could ignore the armoured limos around the map that you were supposed to destroy and just wreak havoc against Mk IIs and other annoying vehicles. The best part was that most players didn't know what this mission was, since it didn't get launched by anyone very much, but once the timer ran out the session quickly returned to normal.

Ultimately you can never really win against a determined griefer, and in later years I would just refuse to engage with them. As a grinder time is money, and all a griefer really needs to do to beat you is waste your time. Driving a heavily armoured vehicle was always useful and if they just wouldn't quit then launching a quick session of Haulage would be fun as the trailer was indestructible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ub8LlQ5drM

VI. THE CARGOBOB

One of my favourite DLCs was Import/Export because it actually was Grand Theft Auto! I always loved those missions in the earlier games where you had a list of cars to steal and bring to the docks, only in this version you put them in your own warehouse, resprayed and customised them and then sold them. I also liked the fact that it was an add-on to the office and it felt like Rockstar had some kind of a road map where you could slowly build your criminal empire into something much larger.

One of the missions involved picking up a car from a barge out in the ocean using a helicopter. I played this mission a few times before I had the thought that maybe the cars on the other source missions could be picked up by the Cargobob. To my surprise I found that all of the cars on the Import/Export missions could be hooked onto and carried back to the warehouse, and there was even an animation showing you dropping off the car and your mechanic getting into it, which confirmed that this was actually how Rockstar intended you to do these missions. Not only that, but you could deliver the cars this way too, which avoided all the problems of driving through traffic and getting the cars damaged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=losvZnEUvco

The only problem with this system was that you had to steal the Cargobob from the Merryweather base and they liked to shoot at your helicopter and damage it. Then Rockstar put the Cargobob on the website for you to buy, allowing you to call it in as a Pegasus vehicle. Later, with the Smuggler's Run dlc it became possible to store and customise your Cargobob as a personal vehicle.

The helicopter was once more a useful addition to the game and it could even be used on some bunker missions and nightclub deliveries, as well the auto shop deliveries.

VII. THE CONTENT CREATOR

When the Content Creator was first added it allowed players to make custom races and death matches. Then Last Team Standing and Captures were added. It was one of my favourite things to mess around in and I think I learned a bit about game design in the process. One job I created had three teams starting in their respective hideouts, with the objective of collecting bags of cash from the Pacific Standard Bank in Vinewood (the job was created before the Heists dlc and had obviously been intended to be part of that update as it had a fully featured interior that could be accessed.

Outside the bank was an armoured car and some security guards, which were programmed to shoot the players on sight. Of course killing the guards triggered the local police, and very quickly there was a huge firefight between rival players and the police. I had also made sure that players respawned nearby so killing them didn't actually achieve much.

Once players got inside the bank they had to make their way up the stairs to the rear, along the gallery above the main floor, through a door into the offices and down some stairs to where the cash bags were waiting. When players died they dropped their bags (they could only carry two at a time) for another player to collect.

The big problem was that most players couldn't figure out where to take the bags to. Two of the hideouts were underground and the GPS wasn't sophisticated enough to show the access point to the subway that the players needed to use. I discovered that a lot of players would slavishly follow the GPS route rather than remembering the location where they'd started the game. The other thing that they didn't realise was that once the bags were stored in their hideout, a player from another team could steal them. If you were one of the other teams with a hideout in the subway you could actually use the tunnels to get into one of the hideouts and bring them back to your own. It's also worth mentioning that players didn't appear on other player's radars until they were close by.

I loved the chaos of this job, but it got increasingly more and more difficult to find players to join it. Likewise the demolition derby I created, which was a deathmatch that only had vehicles and no weapons. These games were always far more entertaining when there was a full lobby, but the matchmaking system never really improved over the twelve years of the game; in fact it seemed to get worse.

I made hundreds of jobs and a few of them seem to have been quite popular, according to the Social Club. Some of my jobs were reduxes of Rockstar created jobs. When Grand Tour was removed from the game I made a clone of it, adding improvements like a 30 car starting grid in Paleto and a double loop around Legion Square that brought the field back together briefly before the finish. I also made a couple of reduxes of The Battle of Senora with updated vehicles replacing tanks, helicopters and jets.

Later Survivals were also added to the Creator, as well as a host of props from the Cunning Stunts dlc, making it possible to create some really fun jobs. Amongst my survivals the most popular was the one set on a cargo ship and the one on the Land Act Dam. These frequently tested even the most experienced players and I don't anyone ever reached the end of either of them.

The one thing that I had always wanted in the Creator though was to make my own missions. I had seen screenshots of the software that Rockstar used to make contact missions and adversary modes, and last year the mission creator was added. Unfortunately I think it was too late to be of any use, and though it was feature packed I never quite had the enthusiasm to get into it. The system for creating missions is a lot more complex, with conditional objectives and cutscenes, but as there are very rarely any players around in the lobbys these days it seemed a bit pointless to invest the time needed to understand it.

VIII. FAN FICTION

At a certain point, even creating my own jobs wasn't enough, and I decided to create a casino heist. Long before the Casino was revamped and we got the actual Casino Heist dlc, there had rumours that it was supposed to have been featured in a single player dlc, or maybe an online heist. Someone had found audio in the game files of Lester calling the player and telling them the old casino had reopened and would they like to meet him for a look around.

I began researching the building and thinking about how Rockstar might approach such a heist. Having seen the original heists, I worked out the five setup missions that the player would need to complete, and then started working on the grand finale.

I always loved the Mission: Impossible tv series and gave my main character the task of driving around in game a scoping out various locations and options to figure out a way to pull this off. The getaway was to be via a Sandking truck parked in the casino as a prize vehicle. The truck would need to be swapped out of course in one of the setups, so it contained the scuba gear the team would need to board the submarine. They would also need a submarine.

The getaway route, the infiltration of the casino and all of the other aspects of the heist were worked out and then I wrote the whole thing as a piece of fan fiction. For a couple of months I was enrossed in this totally self created escapade and I even made some of the setups into custom jobs so I could get images of the various set pieces.

You can read the full story here.

IX. ALL GOOD THINGS...

Rumours about the release of GTA VI weren't so much speculation as a certainty. Rockstar had created the most successful entertainment property in history, and GTA: Online was making them billions ever year; many times the initial budget of GTA V. The question wasn't 'if' GTA VI would be released, but when. That raised many questions about the future of GTA: Online in its current form.

Would a new Online be created or would players be able to fly between Los Santos, Vice City and perhaps even Liberty City? Would a totally new Online based on the latest version of the RAGE engine mean that everything would have to start again?

When Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018 many people wondered if it would take all of the players out of GTA: Online and lead to it being shut down, but RDR: Online was not given the level of support that it could have, maybe for this reason. Some players still play RDR: Online, and some player never even made the switch from GTA IV, mainly because they resented the fact that the consoles wanted to charge players money for connecting to the servers.

It has been apparent over the last few years that Rockstar has been using GTA: Online as a testing ground for the next version of Online. Advanced handling flags and GTA+ are two examples of ideas that seem to have been half-baked when they were put into Online, but which were tinkered around with. I also heard a rumour that the Cayo Perico dlc was made up of content cut from GTA VI, with the theme supposedly being set in the 1960s. Many of the new vehicles added to the game also appear to be taken directly from the new game, which isn't surprising given that the studio is working flat out on VI and doesn't want to put resources into creating content for a twelve year old game.

It's clear that a mothballed version of GTA: Online in its final form could be viable for Rockstar for a few years, especially since it has such a huge library of missions, games, activities, and businesses. Starting again in a new city with a new character would perhaps seem like a daunting prospect for some players, and some might choose to wait before they make the jump.

I've also noticed a difference in the vibe the last few times I've logged into online. Most of the nasty and toxic element in the game appear to have left and its now possible to stand around and just chill with people. It is now possible to pull up next to someone at the side of the road and have them get into your car and go for a ride, or invite you to their garage. The problem is that the game isn't evolving any more and so there is no reason to come up with new strategies, or to hone my flying skills.

People have been saying that Online is dead for at least the last eight years, and they might finally be right. I've only really logged in this year when there's been a game mode I really like offering double-cash. I don't need the money of course, but these events usually ensure that there's lots of players willing to join the jobs. Adversary modes like The Vespucci Job and Overtime Shootout being particular favourites of mine. I also logged in a few times when they were offering 4x money on the original Contact Missions, which seem so different now that we have so many weaponised vehicles.

For the most part though I haven't felt like playing GTA: Online, which both surprises and saddens me. Often I would log into the game to visit the Casino and then try to start a job or something and just sit there waiting for players.

This game has been a huge part of my life for a long time. When I lived on my own and worked fifteen hour shifts I would spend my entire day off in Online. I would live in Los Santos in preference to living in the real world and it does not surprise me that the game says I have spent over 400 days entirely inside the game; more than one entire year in the last twelve. I suppose it was fun to pretend to be someone else and have a whole life full of important decisions which ultimately were of no consequence whatsoever.

So, goodbye GTA: Online. It's been a blast and I will always remember you fondly, but now it's time to move on.

See you all in Vice City!