I love that feeling when you’re in a car, your head filled with plans and worries, chatting away — and then an unexpected song comes on the radio and changes everything. For the next few minutes all plans are forgotten, all worries shoved aside. Suddenly, everyone in the car is silent and locked into their own internal worlds, hypnotized by the music and the scenery and the simple power of momentum.
This kind of experience is a huge 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 too. Even from the first installments, with their simple top-down cities, these games have understood that music shouldn’t just enhance an existing tone or add emphasis to a mission you’re already in.
Instead, they understand that sometimes the radio should sideswipe you. Sometimes it should pull you right out of your current agenda or your emerging plan, and it should suspend you in nothing but the music and the environment, and the new mood that has suddenly been created. This has been my theory for years, anyway, and recently I went into GTA 5 to test it out once more.
My wife, who is a GTA 5 superfan, headed into the game with me as we stole a car and set off across the streets of Los Santos. She helped me evade some early cops and then we turned on the radio. Listen.
Years ago, my mother used to tell us that there was only one radio station in Los Angeles, by which she meant KMET, the addled home of progressive rock. Us kids were young at the time, and we took her very literally when she said this, even though she merely meant that she always wanted to be in arm’s reach of listening to “Baker Street” while navigating traffic. Spool forward almost four decades, and I’ll say this: There’s only one radio station in Los Santos.
It’s Non-Stop Pop. I get what my mom meant: This is the only station that matters. Here are bubblegum hits and shimmering deep cuts, all served up by DJ Cara — voiced by Cara Delevingne — who slides in semi-regularly to drop inspirational bon mots like: “What are you hoarding your money for? Buy a drum kit!” Non-Stop Pop is the best radio station in Los Santos, and it’s for exactly the reasons I’ve been talking about: Its music plays across GTA ’s design as often as it slots neatly into the grooves.
Case in point. With the cops far behind us and the road leading north, my wife suggested ditching the car by a beach and swimming with whales. A perfect plan.
We were looking for a turnoff, but then Dirty Vegas came on. It was dawn, which turned out to be the perfect time to listen to the dripping, bubbling grotto that is “Days Go By.” It felt like both of our minds had been wiped at once.
No chat. No ambitions. Just Braddock Pass to Mount Chiliad and us in our car slipping through the mineral wind of a new morning as this almost-forgotten song played and the sky turned a luminous pearly blue.
It wasn’t over, though. Next on the radio came “Pure Shores” by All Saints, and that fairly lofted us all the way to Paleto Bay, any thought of whales completely forgotten. Everything was forgotten: We were empty-headed, nostalgic, slightly wistful.
All of this in a game that’s often concerned with robbing banks and backing over security guards. Moments like this are GTA to their core, but they’re GTA when it’s busy recognizing the magical power of trashy radio. This magic is not complex.
It often comes down to selecting a song you’d never consider putting on, in a situation you’d never choose to hear it in, yet somehow it mints these little moments of perfection nonetheless. Perfection can take strange shapes. Minutes after Paleto Bay, we were driving a stolen minivan onto the map’s deadly military base just as Gorillaz came on and DJ Cara stepped in to warn us we were all doomed to irrelevance.
Five minutes later, I accidentally pancaked an entire street gang who had been minding their own business in Los Santos’ ersatz LA river, when the universe decided that an ancient Wham! song should accompany our escape through drainage channels underneath a huge half-moon. Creating effects like this, through happenstance and the effortless familiarity of yesterday’s hits, costs time and money. Time and money are amongst Rockstar’s superpowers, which explains why this stuff happens in GTA more 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 a part of the world we already live in. I can’t even imagine how much of GTA 5 ’s budget went into the radio.
There are so many stations, all richly conceived. Alongside Non-Stop Pop there’s stuff like Radio Mirror Park, which my wife describes as the perfect music for getting high to, and Rebel Radio spilling out country. There’s West Coast Talk Radio and Blaine County Radio, whose incessant chattering mixes conspiracy theories with bunker design tips and fond Y2K memories, feeling eerily realistic as a result.
There’s hours of this, and somebody had to write it all, and somebody 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 on something that disappears the moment you decide to play the game muted? I have a theory.
Along with that peculiar ability of radio to transport and reorient when you’re driving, and along with the fact that U.S. talk radio was unconsciously satirizing the modern world long before Rockstar started to try, I suspect there’s a deeper synergy at work.
I suspect that radio and GTA belong together because commercial radio does a lot of the same things that GTA’s designers do. It compacts, remixes, and curates shared experiences. Rockstar codified the modern open-world game design, but these days the developer’s often a DJ rather than a composer.
The studio scrambles, restages, and reframes themes and scenes and archetypes that already exist in popular culture. That’s true of gunfights and mob movies, and it’s true of cities. GTA 5 is a gorgeous recreation of popular ideas of Los Angeles — an awful lot of different, sometimes conflicting popular ideas.
Smoggy cocktail-pink sunsets, the PCH, Nakatomi Plaza, the wastrels of Beverly Hills, even that weird gift shop at the LA County Coroner’s office — all of this is broken down, polished up and stuck back together in an endless curated loop, as you circle from street to street and mission to mission. Isn’t this the work of a DJ as much as a video game world builder? Yes, GTA boils down the street maps and goes to the thesaurus for the funny names, but it also takes your favorite mental images of LA or Miami and runs them together as a DJ might. In fact, focusing in on DJs and how they work with music and memory to create mood might provide the best sense of what Rockstar thinks the game designer’s job is.
Rockstar wants to give you something you already know, but in a way that feels so vivid and panoramic and kinetic that you’ll always see it the way the studio presented it from that point on. Rockstar wants to watermark the vistas that already exist in your mind. So.
Do people listen to the radio anymore? Certainly, but probably not as much as in the days when my mother was tuned to KMET. Radio competes with Spotify, Audible, and social media. I think you can see this reflected in GTA too.
When the trailer dropped for GTA 6 , I was fascinated to see the greatest remixers in video games at it again. And look at the memes and video clips and scrolling comment sections as alligators paced convenience stores and befuddled women lugged hammers around. Rockstar clearly has its eye on TikTok now as much as it does the great Florida crime stories.
After all, TikTok feels like the most radio-like of all social media platforms. Here is a lurid world of beauty and chaos and endless reorienting distraction. It’s both familiar and surprising, and you’ll never get to the end of it.
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