Rockstar reportedly had some fascinating ideas for mainstream crossover for Grand Theft Auto.
Musician and producer Jermaine Dupri started out as one half of teen hip-hop duo Kriss Kross, producing their 1992 breakout hit Jump. Today he heads So So Def Recordings, and obviously knows a lot of people in the industry, including the now infamous Canadian rapper Drake. In a new interview for the podcast New Rory & Mal, he became the surprising source of a new rumor about, of all things, Grand Theft Auto.
Dupri said this (edited for clarity):
Like, somebody, they asked me to do Grand Theft Auto. And they were saying, like, Drake got his own radio station on Grand Theft Auto. The way that they’re getting ready to do it is that Drake can actually upload music that we probably ain’t never even heard online or wherever else on that video game.
…that’s like a playlist for a video game. I’m saying it’s still inside that game. You got to get on your car to actually play the music and hear it, right? They’re actually making it where it’s just, like, you got to get in the car that’s on that Grand Theft Auto to hear these songs.
Dupri was talking about this as part of a bigger conversation about how AI could now affect the music industry. While this isn’t the same thing as generative AI, one can conclude that he was bringing this up as an example of how musicians can have meaningful interactions with cutting edge technology.
While Rockstar is famously particular about the curation of the music in the Grand Theft Auto games, they have been playing around with broader interaction with the music industry. For example, the 2021 Grand Theft Auto Online Story called The Contract featured several hiphop musicians, including Dre as an in-game character.
We won’t go through the history of cameos and appearances for musicians in video games, but we believe that Fortnite x Kid A Mnesia was a particular landmark event in this field. For musicians to now go as far as debut their music on Grand Theft Auto, treating it as a new music platform in itself, would be groundbreaking as far as these crossovers and collaborations go.
As you can see from Dupri’s comments, he didn’t specifically mention Grand Theft Auto 6, so this may not be an upcoming feature for that game. In fact, it’s entirely possible that he’s referring to something that Rockstar was thinking about years ago, but ended up not doing. So we would be careful to tout this as some kind of spoiler for either Grand Theft Auto 6 or Grand Theft Auto Online.
With that said, no one would deny that this is something that Rockstar could manage to pull off, if Drake or other musicians were interested. It would be great if Rockstar saw the interest in something like this and deciding to bring it back if it was something they cancelled long ago. We’d love to hear from Rockstar about what they think about all of this.
