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There is nothing new under the sun, as it says in Ecclesiastes, and while the internet was losing its collective mind over the second GTA 6 trailer, two thoughts trickled across my neurons. The first was "that sounds a lot like Stephen Root, two-time winner of the gruffest dad competition," while the second was "wait, hang on – are we going to get a bartending minigame?"
This second thought spurred from one otherwise fairly throwaway scene. You may have noticed the line Lucia says "trust me, this place is just the start for us", followed by another character exuberantly shouting "ring the bell!" at a bar opening. We don't know what they're celebrating, but all of this makes me wonder whether Grand Theft Auto 6 has taken notice of some other games in its oeuvre, which often feature elements of business management. One recent example of this is Schedule 1, where you quite literally launder money by buying a launderette. An even better example of this is the Yakuza franchise – specifically Yakuza 0.
Passing the bar
While famous for its exuberant tone, wild fights, and sharp suits, Yakuza 0 features a cabaret club management minigame that absorbed far too much of my life back in 2019. Hiring staff, dressing them up, and completing customer requests is just excellent fun, and a nice break from the game's endless fights. The same game also featured a minigame that saw you running a real estate empire. If GTA 6 has taken note of these, it has an even higher chance of being an all-timer.
I've long criticized GTA games' mission design as essentially being "drive somewhere, shoot a dude", and GTA 5 did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. While innovative in some ways, the vast majority of the missions involved driving and shooting as two of your key gameplay verbs, and look, that just gets a bit boring. I like driving and shooting guns as much as the next person, but do it too often and you're effectively just a janitor with a very loud mop. Yet maybe, just maybe, we're going to see something different in GTA 6.
It encourages me that the game is being made by a different crew within Rockstar. Business management – if my wildest dreams come true – could be as simple as something like Dave the Diver's restaurant management minigame or Yakuza 0's cabaret club management. The line "this place is just the start" makes me wonder whether the bar is just one example of a potential side activity that may be present in GTA 6.
I think that this kind of thing gives the game personality. The Saints Row series is famed for its side missions in a GTA-like setting, but you don't even need to look that far. GTA 5 had surface-level property management minigames, but older GTA titles had even more. Who can forget playing GTA: San Andreas or Vice City and hopping into an ambulance, fire engine, police car or taxi for a spot of honest labor?
San Andreas is a great example, still being Rockstar's magnum opus and once-tamed white whale. This game also included trucking missions that saw you hauling goods across the length and breadth of the map, driving freight trains, or committing burglary, for those who still wanted a touch of crime in their side gigs.
Expecting GTA 6 to be as ridiculously endowed with optional content as GTA: San Andreas is likely a fool's errand, not least because we're almost certainly also going to get GTA Online 2 – which could cover a lot of those immersive bases – at launch or shortly after. However, the game may well be a step in the right direction after GTA 4 and 5, which saw the game eschewing a lot of its less vital content for a more cinematic story. There's no reason that we can't have both – hell, Red Dead Redemption 2 had a good deal of side content with its crafting systems, legendary animals to hunt, wanted posters, and "Strangers and Freaks" missions.
As a broader franchise, GTA has always been a place for you to make your own fun. GTA 5 in particular is a genuinely excellent chaos engine for this kind of thing, but the more options for getting into stupid situations the better. Give me a bar management minigame, Rockstar. I know that you can do it – let me play Diner Dash with rambunctious patrons and get into barroom brawls. Let's own property and get more in-depth with property management. I really hope this is what GTA 6 has got up its sleeve, and I genuinely can't wait until we find out more.
Check out our GTA 6 wishlist for everything we'd like to see in our return to Vice City
