Rockstar has announced a new real life event for Grand Theft Auto Online.
They made this announcement on Twitter:
Celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival in GTA Online.
Play anytime through October 8 to get the Red Yeti Fall Cap and may your future be as bright as a full moon over Los Santos.
What Is The Mid-Autumn Festival?
The Mid-Autumn Festival might be better known as the Mooncake Festival or Moon Festival. This holiday is based on the Chinese calendar as opposed to the Roman calendar the world has more widely adopted.
It’s set on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese year. We usually find that this occurs between the middle of September to the start of October.
This is a harvest festival that’s celebrated by Chinese around the world. And China’s neighbors have their versions of this festival as well.
For example, if you’re a kpop fan, you may know about the Korean festival Chuseok. In Japan it’s called Tsukimi, and in South East Asian countries they refer to it as their Lantern Festival.
What Does The Red Yeti Have To Do With All This?
Unfortunately, after doing our best to research this, we couldn’t actually figure out what Rockstar was thinking.
In this context, YETI does not refer to the Yeti in Grand Theft Auto Online that you can hunt down in Paleto Forest. There’s an in-game apparel brand called YETI.
YETI is a parody of Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape, more commonly known as BAPE. But if that were the case, Rockstar took very little effort to celebrate this big Asian holiday.
How Close Should Grand Theft Auto Mirror America?
Of course, we know that Rockstar made a 2009 game called Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. This game tells a story about the Chinese Ttriad set in Liberty City.
And the Triads are present in Los Santos and Little Seoul in Grand Theft Auto Online today. But we wonder if Rockstar should be doing more to bring more representation to Chinese culture in the game.
We recently reported on Grand Theft Auto Online’s Oktoberfest celebrations. Oktoberfest is a lot more prominent and is going on for longer.
We are mindful that there is a level of satire to Grand Theft Auto Online. Rockstar is smart not to lean too much on that when they celebrate the holidays.
But we think there’s a way to do more with this and other holidays, that would also give players more fun things to do. Rockstar doesn’t even have to create new DLC; they just need to get more creative and try.
