When Dead Space director Glen Schofield fought to introduce exoskeletons to Call of Duty, did he imagine one would eventually carry Roger the alien from American Dad into battle? The question may be moot when Roger is diving from a plane alongside Recon Beavis, Infil Butt-Head, and a walking anorak that stumbled off the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Once they land, they'll be checking their corners for anime reworks of campaign characters, or squid-faced perversions of Black Ops fixture Frank Woods. And when the shooting starts, their enemies might have trouble determining where Butt-Head's hitbox even ends – his skull clipping straight through the top of his gas mask, at a point level with his cavernous nose.
Once you realise that all of the above skins entered Call of Duty's item store in the last two months, you get a true sense of the utter visual and aural disharmony that has ruled COD of late. No wonder that Activision has felt compelled to put out a statement acknowledging it might have "drifted from what made Call of Duty unique in the first place: immersive, intense, visceral and in many ways grounded".
As a consequence, operator skins won't carry forward into Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as previously planned – an act akin to closing the bulkhead doors on a rising mass of horse-headed abominations and dead-eyed Ana de Armas waxworks. Activision's assurances land on sceptical ears, however. Ever since the pandemic, the aesthetic of each new COD entry has gradually deteriorated over the course of its life. Now, a pervasive atmosphere of 'will this do?' inevitably stinks up the joint.
Except...
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It's not inevitable. Even in the age of Fortnite – with the once-grand promise of the metaverse amounting to a glut of low-effort brand crossovers in online spaces – one holdout remains. Right at the very top of the totem pole, GTA Online has kept its cool.
Can you imagine how many hundreds of companies must have approached Rockstar about potential collaborations, each waving a checkbook (or a shoulder-slung bag of heist cash, for a Los Santos-appropriate metaphor)? Yet while the designers of Far Cry 6 have been asked to implement missions riffing on Rambo and Stranger Things, diluting the integrity of their open world in the process, Rockstar has remained steadfast.
Yes, there are cameos from real-world figures in GTA Online. There always have been, if you count the simpering digital counterpart of Lazlow Jones. But who makes it into the game and how are these questions guided by taste and restraint? You only get a station on GTA's radio wheel if you're Frank Ocean, Julian Casablancas or Soulwax – peerless innovators in the fields of R&B, indie rock and EDM respectively. Equally, the company prides itself as a champion of underground artists. The Blessed Madonna may have entered the mainstream public consciousness via Marea (We've Lost Dancing), an unusually wistful dance track that captured the moment during Covid lockdowns. But in GTA, players were installing her as the resident DJ of their clubs back in 2018.
Rockstar evidently isn't interested in desperately clawing after the fleeting attention that crossovers with viral Netflix shows might bring. Rather, it treats GTA Online the same way it does its record label, CircoLoco - as a highly curated VIP section of people it truly admires. In doing so, it gives those creators a leg up.
OK, so one man who doesn't need a leg-up is Dr Dre, the godfather of gangsta rap and hip-hop's first billionaire. But the nature of Dre's inclusion in GTA Online exemplifies the artful consideration with which Rockstar handles cameos. In many ways, his appearance is the culmination of a decade and a half's work, beginning with the hiring of writer-musician DJ Pooh to capture the culture of West Coast rap in GTA: San Andreas.
The set of missions which players embark on at Dre's behest concern stolen music from the producer's files. As you come down hard on the chancers who have leaked the beats, it's impossible not to think of Dre's real-world reputation for sitting on a hoard of unreleased tracks, his late career seemingly crippled by perfectionism.
There's real catharsis, then, when at the conclusion of the thread, Dre decides to put the music out into the public realm. "I've gotta stop holding on too tight," he realizes. "I've gotta start putting some of these demos out that I've been working on for so many years." Sure enough, the EP that accompanied Dre's GTA collab was his first significant new release since 2015. Who would have thought that a celebrity cameo on a live-service platform could be emotionally fulfilling, and shift the public perception of a famous creator in a meaningful way?
Of course, Rockstar has made missteps when it comes to online stores and in-game purchases too. The buzzing irritant of rocket-equipped flying motorbikes, forever plaguing GTA Online's public servers, is testament to that. Even so: once the dust clears on the crossover era, I suspect GTA will be the only major online series not to have embarrassed itself.
Check out our GTA 6 wishlist to see what we want from the series' next entry
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