Why ‘Grand Theft Auto Five’ Made Over A Billion Dollars: The sign of times to come
Everybody is good at something if they spend any time and effort to dig out their uniqueness from the swirling broth of social soup. I have been fortunate to discover that I am good at a lot of things one of which is the unique skill of discovering trends a long way out before they manifest into the rest of society. I predicted well over 15 years ago the collapse of the housing market—which my daughter reminds me of often. Over ten years ago I predicted the rise of a welfare politician like Barack Obama, the collapse of Europe financially, and the current bursting of the college bubble. I would have vast arguments/discussions with my in-laws over college back in a time when everyone was going and was ashamed to say otherwise. The view I argued against was that college was not a magic Harry Potter potion where once a degree was obtained would fill the personal bank accounts of the graduates. Their view of college had been shaped by LBJ’s great society, and blinded them to the perilous results currently before us all—leaving unskilled spoiled brats as the primary workforce who were trained by their educations to be government workers and nothing else, because nothing else in the reality of capitalism supports the view of the world shaped by modern public education and college experiences.
Another unique skill I have is the ability to be surrounded with the worst news possible, death, famine, ignorance, hard luck, etc., and still find something good to work with in order to escape. This has been beneficial as a family matriarch and those who have ridden my coattails in the past have discovered the financial benefits of tagging along for the ride as I can drag them through the worst portions of their life and they will come out smelling like roses on the other end. The trick is that they have to shut up and listen. I don’t mind people riding my coat tails until they become back seat drivers and attempt to share equal credit for the decisions made along the way. I don’t do the sharing thing, not even when it comes to ideas.
With all that in mind I mentioned a few days ago the trend of Fantasy Flight Games as a gaming company that is unusually good at what they do, and how an emerging market is changing to intersect their particular business model. Part of the creation of that business model is the failure of public education and the open rebellion that millennials are about to unleash upon the global marketplace. Well, as I was making those statements Rock Star Games, a video game manufacturer of popular titles like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and L.A. Noire released the fifth edition of their very violent and morally decrepit game, Grand Theft Auto. In the first twenty-four hours of release, GTA5 made $800 million dollars and in just three days hit one billion in sales.
I have played Red Dead and L.A. Noire, and both are wonderful games. Red Dead is one of the best modern westerns I have ever seen, it’s a great game with large open worlds and is a real technical marvel driven by intensely realistic story lines. It was a successful title. L.A. Noire was a L.A. Confidential type of story that featured good guys in 1940’s Los Angeles solving crimes to root out the bad guys. As good as that game was, it did not find an audience, as modern young people who drive the video game market could not relate. So they shrugged the game. Grand Theft Auto is a game that I can’t stand however, because it is evil. It requires the player to be bad in order to succeed and glorifies drug selling, prostitution, and social decrepitude. So I don’t play it, and have rejected the title.
Yet millions of kids absolutely love GTA which is a kind of compass needle which points to the direction society is moving—one that current education lovers, government statists, and political think tanks will find repulsive. A video game with a billion dollars in sales has the power to change cultural references. Movies that make a billion dollars during their entire release are thought of as social shaping indicators that drive artistically the values of human culture—and are taken very seriously. Musical records that make that much money over a multiyear period are considered classics that define the generation of their release, but there are no definitions that can articulate the impact of a GTA video game that makes over a billion dollars in just three days. The plot of the game is the beating and maiming of street whores, having shoot-outs with police, and stealing cars, and the graphics are very realistic.
I’m not going to say that the game is bad however. It is a work of art that reflects the times that created it. For all the reasons that L.A. Noire failed, GTA succeeds because it is the product of the first generation that have grown up entirely with failed role-models in their lives. The parents at the homes of millennials have divorced too often and shown themselves to be physical and intellectual weaklings. Father can never know best because he is on his second and third marriage by the time he’s forty. Meanwhile the millennial’s step-fathers are losers who have sex with their mothers and complain a lot and do not have the moral authority to discipline children. The teachers at their schools are out-of-touch and seem to be coming from a different world. They are teaching statism to a generation that will be lucky to maintain a job at McDonalds—let alone work in a six figure income. Millennials have had their religion stripped away from them and have been molded socially with a dangerous replacement of socialism taught in their schools mixed with carefully controlled capitalism broadcast to them from the largest stable influence in their lives, the television. They can’t trust their teachers, they can’t trust their parents, and they can’t trust their religion. They are a hapless heap of social failures created for them by the previous generations functioning from failed philosophy. It is not their fault that they have been given a rage that cannot be communicated any other way but in total social rejection.
When I mentioned that football games in high school were headed toward extinction, the attitude of this millennial generation was what I had in mind. Without values in those experiences, there is nothing to keep their minds anchored into the future—and public schools have taught the opposite. They have exacerbated this entire situation. Public schools have imposed themselves upon the American family, helping to destroy families, showing children that the real authority in the world is what they see at school, not at home, which is draped with chaos and decadence.
The success of Grand Theft Auto 5 is a sign of the times to come. The players are living out a fantasy that fulfills the emptiness given to them by a statist society overflowing with failure. I would say that GTA5 is the ultimate libertarian fantasy, and that will be the political persuasion of this millennial generation. I am so sure of it that you dear reader can mark it on your calendar. Within ten years it will be discovered that social gun acceptance will increase dramatically, sexual promiscuity will greatly increase, drug use will become more open, and a hatred of the police will permeate a vast majority of the population. The social models that were built-in America from the 1930’s to the 1980’s will be wiped away completely for good and bad leaving a world that will not be surprised by every mass shooting that occurs, won’t give a damn about fairness or equality, and will have no respect for the law, or the politicians who make them. For those over 40 who found the Occupy Wall-Street crowd dangerous, and morally corrupt, nothing has been seen yet as these poor hopeless millennials were born without trust and let down by every adult they had ever met from the time of birth till their social maturity at age 10.
It won’t be Rock Star Games that is at fault for the decadence of society in the years to come, it is the failure of an education system driven by government to carry entire generations of people to a statist philosophy that was rejected at the most primal levels of subsequent age brackets. After all, public education is sold to the public as the fix all for all problems, and quite the opposite is true. The failure of public education is the reason that GTA 5 made a billion dollars in three days. It is the reason I hate public education so intensely because it is creating the kind of world where young people cannot relate to good guys, but only the bad.
When I was a kid playing cops and robbers provoked fights because nobody wanted to play the bad guy. Everyone wanted to be the good guy. This was the result of previous generations who had grown up on westerns and kids saw that their parents liked good guys and hated the bad—and kids always wanting deep in their minds to please their parents wanted to be something their parents would respect. So every kid wanted to play the good guy in such games. Now it is the opposite problem. Now kids fight to be the bad guy. They have learned that their parents are flawed characters and cannot be made to be happy, so they have given up. Public schools sought to fill the void with statist educations which only made things worse. That is why GTA5 is such a hot seller and is the envy of the entertainment market. The movie industry is aghast by the numbers, politicians are completely unable to comprehend the why or how. Society is in for a very rough ride that they are not prepared to deal with. Politics will change dramatically within the decade—and there is no stopping it at this point. The situation will just have to play itself out. To understand that situation, study the sales of Grand Theft Auto 5, and the future of America will become quite clear, and it has nothing to do with the values of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, or the hand holding unified world of George Soros. It will be more like the plot of Grand Theft Auto 5, and for that, the blame deserves to be placed on the shoulders of the institution that promised since the creation of The Department of Education in 1979 to make society better not worse. Public education is the cause of GTA5’s success, and the blame deserves to be assigned there and only there as it has ushered in a period that will be one of the darkest in the American experience. Mark my words—I see it as clear as a noon day sun upon a hot cloudless desert.
Rich Hoffman
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