The arrival of a Grand Theft Auto game into the household of any suburban adolescent is generally one of the main focal points in their coming-of-age process.
Generally, the main demographic of its fanbase' first exposure to the series occurs as impressionable pre-teens, learning of its existence from their peers on the school playground, much to the disapproval of their concerned parents.

Afterwards, gaining commercial infamy due to its nihilistic satirical parody of the superficial materialism of not just western societal norms such as reality TV, social media, gangster rap, and even video game players themselves, but it's vicious juvenile mockery of the stereotypes of counter culture also, such as punk rock or the hippie movement, attempting to delegate everything in sight into one extravagent ♥♥♥♥ joke, with its unapologetically xenophobic and sexist humour, albeit doing so with such a level of emotional intelligence and awareness of current events that it's hard to discredit its comedic sensibilities.

Corrupt cops, drag queens, gang turf wars, rednecks,drug smuggling immigrants, sweet talking politicians, frivolous pop culture references, profane-laced cartoon sketches, transgender radio hosts and licenced imitations of real life public figures. Absolutely nothing is safe. Akin to Borat playfully ridiculing celebrities, and John Lydon being ostracised by the British royalty for exposing the secretive antics of Jimmy Saville. In terms of controversy, GTA typically lands somewhere in the middle.

As any fan of any age will tell you, though, it's main selling point is not in its controversy but in its apparent open endedness and the freedom it awards the player with, as it not just pushes, but throttles the envelope of each generation's hardware capabilities with production values to not just rival, but trump, almost any blockbuster movie in the modern era, spawning imitators galore. It's characters repeatedly draw paralells from said blockbuster movies as it's creative yet shallow stereotypical gangster protagonists exhibit uncanny resemblences to criminal underlords showcased in film throughout the 80's and 90's, backed by soundtracks worthy of not just a Spotify compilation playlist but a potential stable placeholder of any music snob's home shelf.

Traditionally, Grand Theft Auto is a series that incorporates elements of multiple genres, although admittedly steeped in a level of mediocrity. Dipping its toes in both third and first-person cover-based shooting, racing games, and hand-to-hand combat systems. These are all welcome additions to a game world which functions essentially as a glorified virtual tourism simulation, offering attractions like deep-sea diving, base jumping, pitch & putt courses, wall street shopping malls, selfie-obsessed in-game hipster websites imposing their liberal millennial ideologies, and gamified makeshift representations of stock markets and other various eCommerce industries.

Stumbling upon seemingly unscripted, dynamic narrative encounters while exploring hollywoodesque re-creations of North American cityscapes, does nothing to subtract from it's exposition. Due to the credibility of it's complete whole, GTA allows the player the ability to abandon and then refamiliarise themselves with the storyline completely at will. However, If GTA was a game that had no narrative whatsoever, it wouldn't remotely hinder the amount of tales you had in your arsenal to one-up your friends once you returned to the school playground. It's very possible to make an argument for the series' narratives being merely a distraction from the near-endless possible emergent scenarios that can be experienced in its buzzing sandbox, much to the delight of its active modding fanbase.

The ability to generate player-made anecdotes by exploiting its hilariously unpredictable systems usually leads to an exaggerated knock-on effect. For example, casually stealing a bicycle could lead to a wild goose chase involving Apache attack helicopters, as the player scales the slope of a mountain with the severed skull of a previously oblivious pedestrian dangling from the back wheel, as some licensed 80's anarchist-lite song like 'Rebel Yell' or 'We're Not Gonna Take It' ironically blasts from the radio station of a police vehicle in hot pursuit of their tail. All potentially within the space of ten in-game minutes.

The latest installment in the series heavily expanded into the online world, opening the door for near-endless possible future endeavours and massively extending its life-span, due to the addition of Heists; Rockstar's personal, unique take on Oceans 11. These elaborate, multi-layered, co-operative 'infiltrate and escape' missions offer tremendous replayability value, and once completed, reward the player with huge in-game currencies to assist them as they strive to compete in their economic battle for survival amongst other players in Los Santos. Albeit, with the cumbersome yet predictable addition of excessive microtransactions.

Aside from being a glorified piss-take of modern consumerist America, fittingly backed with the power of hundreds of millions of the 'Dirty Green', the Grand Theft Auto series was far more. It was ditching school an hour early. It was secretly hiding a friend's copy under your bed. It was desperately trying to find a genuine torrent a month before release. It was zoning out and just..driving. But now, due to the unpredictability of the internet and the creativity of both its developers and its fanbase; it's flying cars, it's dressing up as a pizza and running a marathon, it's prank calling the CEO of some lavish enterprise, while your friend kidnaps his daughter. Who knows what it'll become in the future, whether it be through the evolution of its online mode, or future sequels. Given its tradition of laying and then subsequently exceeding the foundation of what open-world games are capable of, the likelihood is high of it far surpassing anything that I could ever possibly predict.