// PC GAMER — GAMING
With Grand Theft Auto 6 poised to take over the world, I reached out to Jack Thompson and it did not go well
GTA is mainstream now, but the fiery activist who raged against violent videogames in the early 2000s has not softened.
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It's hard to imagine now, but a little over 20 years ago the gaming world was absolutely scandalized by Hot Coffee, a mod to activate abandoned code in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that enabled CJ to have interactive sex with his girlfriend.
The game was re-rated as "Adults Only" by the ESRB in 2005, forcing it off retail shelves—this was a time when retail shelf space mattered—and it was banned outright in Australia. Even the US Federal Trade Commission got involved, complaining that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive "did not tell consumers that the game discs contained potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game."
22 years later, with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the verge of console release, it all seems rather quaint. From the ESRB's newly posted rating, here's what we've got to look forward to in GTA 6:
All of which adds up to an M rating—that is, "generally suitable for ages 17 and up." PEGI, the European game rating agency, came down a little harder, rating it 18+ in a since-deleted listing that also noted the presence of "detailed decapitation" and "frequent and prominent" drug use.
How did we get from there to here? Well, we grew up—literally. The Entertainment Software Association said in 2025 that the average gamer in the US is 36 years old and has been playing for 18 years: That's police, politicians, and parents who all came up playing games (including GTA) and view them as no more remarkable than a spicy episode of Miami Vice.
The societal collapse that some alarmists anticipated, meanwhile, failed to materialize—well, it failed to materialize as a result of games, anyway. But a sudden uptick in violent crime and killings, sparked by "murder trainers" like GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo? It never happened. If anything, we've seen the opposite: As gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and the number of gamers has gone up, violent crime has seen a decline over the last two decades.
You could argue, I suppose, that the mainstreaming of Grand Theft Auto represents social desensitization—a loosening of the standards and decorum that made certain kinds of mature content much more taboo. But after years spent bearing witness to the moralizing hand-wringing that gave us the Satanic Panic, the Parents Music Resource Center, the bloody-minded determination to keep the Comics Code Authority alive despite its complete irrelevance, and of course the creation of the ESRB, I'm more inclined to think that what we're really doing is slowly figuring out what actually matters, and acting accordingly.
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