Every Stupid Death in Los Santos

Michael is standing on a roof in Vinewood watching a stolen helicopter spiral into the Pacific. Franklin just walked away from a liquor store with forty-three dollars and a wanted level. Trevor is somewhere in the desert doing something that doesn’t bear thinking about. Los Santos sprawls in every direction, sun-baked and indifferent, and none of it will kill you unless you go out of your way to make it. Which, of course, you will.

Grand Theft Auto V isn’t a game in the conventional sense—it’s a shared hallucination that millions of people agreed to enter simultaneously. I know people whose relationships quietly deteriorated over it in the autumn of 2013. I understand completely. Once you’ve settled into the rhythms of those three men—each of them a different shade of American failure—the real world starts to feel underfurnished. The entire map and everyone in it is interactive at a level that approaches compulsive. You can do anything to anyone. Crime, money, violence, theft, drugs, sex. Basically life, minus consequences.

Rockstar, naturally, also built in an extraordinary number of ways to die. Falls from construction cranes. Exploding fuel tanks. Getting on the wrong side of a biker gang three seconds after spawning. YouTuber Brysi honored this tradition with a GTA V parody of Dumb Ways to Die—the Melbourne Metro safety PSA that accumulated sixty million views by turning fatal stupidity into a cartoon singalong. The original had small soft creatures walking into train doors. Brysi’s version has hard-pixel gangsters getting creatively destroyed across Los Santos. It works better than it should.

Grand Theft Auto V is not a normal entertainment product. By this point, that’s just a fact.