the dream fades away

My favorite gaming memory of 2001 is driving through the rainy Liberty City night with “Fade Away” playing on the radio. The Liberty City of Grand Theft Auto III, unlike that of GTA IV, was inspired in some sense by aspects of New York but was not closely modeled on it, and as a result it felt like an idea, a vision, a dream of an American city–an ugly, unpleasant dream, but a dream nonetheless. And with the motion blur effect making my brake lights leave red trails across the low-detail polygonal urban landscape and the ghostly song (which is itself concerned with dreams) a perfect fit for the melancholy weather and the ever-so-slightly surreal setting, that game worked its way into my subconscious in a way that few games ever do.

Street light fills her empty room
Dark, cold, and lonely
She goes back to her bed
to try to sleep her nightmares away

One day she’ll have the courage
To do what she wants to do
End the life of misery
and for once be happy

Rockstar’s budget for soundtracks got a lot bigger after GTA III and the songs became more recognizable, but I don’t think the series has ever had a more atmospherically effective tune than that. 

Still, flying above the neon lights of Vice City to the sounds of “Out of Touch” by Hall and Oates the following year felt almost as tranquil and surreal to me, and the game’s exaggerated 1980s style fostered the feeling that I had stepped not into a place of asphalt and concrete but an ethereal, alternately beautiful and horrifying dream of 1980s excess.

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With GTA: San Andreas in 2003, the series presented me with a vision of my home city of Los Angeles that was recognizably L.A. and yet not, its familiar landmarks and its geographical strangeness leaving me feeling pleasantly destabilized, and in the way that it didn’t look or feel quite real, it could make even the mundane, smoggy ugliness of Los Angeles weirdly beautiful to me.

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Now, of course, there’s GTA V (again), and yes, of course the graphics are “better” than they ever were in the era of GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. But that comes at a cost. Something is lost. In this incredibly detailed, realistic-looking world, my imagination cannot meet the visuals halfway; there’s nothing for my subconscious to latch onto. It sets out to feel less like a dream of an American city and more like a real one, a place of asphalt and concrete, and, to its merit or detriment, it succeeds. I do not get the pleasant sense of having a waking dream. The ugliness of GTA V’s Los Santos is as mundane and depressing to me as the ugliness of the real L.A.