The Best GTA Game Rockstar Will Never Make
2. The Retro Aesthetic - Capturing A Sense Of Time And Place
Okay, so, after all that talk about the 1950s and '60s projecting a fake image that masked a darker reality, it's time to admit something - the retro aesthetic is incredibly charming. If it wasn't, then Bethesda's Fallout series wouldn't be nearly as charismatic as it is.
This is where I'm going to take a bit of a tangent, and explain where all of this *gestures vaguely at the preceding pages* came about. One of my favourite comic book creators is the late Darwyn Cooke, an extremely talented writer/artist who first carved out a reputation working on the DC animated shows of the late nineties, and one who sadly passed away in 2016.
After working on on shows like Batman the Animated Series and Batman Beyond, Cooke made the transition into comics and his style distinguished him immediately. It was cartoony and vibrant, and the art-deco stylings of BTAS - pioneered in the 1940s by the Fleischer Superman cartoons - translated perfectly to the page. It wasn't long before Cooke crafted what many would consider to be his magnum opus, The New Frontier, a story that applied the real history of the 1950s and '60s to the DC universe during the Golden and Silver ages of comics, which concluded, incidentally, around about the same time historians generally believe the 'long' 1960s did.
Cooke's love for the visuals of that era were more than apparent in that story, but obviously I'm not suggesting that the next GTA should take inspiration from a superhero comic. No, the comic I AM suggesting it take inspiration from is another of Cooke's works, those being his adaptations of Donald Westlake's Parker novels, which released between 2009 and 2013.
For those not familiar with Westlake (who wrote the books under the pseudonym of Richard Stark), the author created the character of Parker - a master thief - in 1962, with his debut story being The Hunter. A number of follow-up books came after, and so too did a number of unofficial movie adaptations. Cooke's graphic-novelisations however stand head and shoulders above all the others, mainly because they're so beautiful to look at and adhered to the original setting of the novels, with the events of The Hunter taking place in '62.
It isn't difficult to see how Rockstar could take advantage of a Parker-esque story, or especially the aesthetic of the comics. Classic sports cars and retro fashion would be great to mess around with in a fully fledged title, as would period-accurate weaponry and architecture. Plus, given we've seen Rockstar take immersion to new heights in Red Dead, there should be no worries that they'd be able to do the same with the fifties and sixties, both narratively speaking and gameplay-wise.
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