When I listen to Dr. Dre’s 2001 album, I think about Ninja Gaiden, a completely unrelated action game from Team Ninja. I played the two together and they’re now inextricably linked in my mind – hearing those tracks transports me to a specific moment in time, crystallized in my memories. I can almost taste it. With the latest update for GTA Online – a game about growing your own criminal empire by buying up properties and businesses – developer Rockstar Games wants to use the emotional resonance of music to capture some of your brain’s real estate for itself.
GTA Online is bursting at the seams. Step into Los Santos as a new player and you’re met with races, missions, heists, a property market, car modification, shootouts, business management, the opportunity to make your own gang, and more – all while JohnnyGamer69 flies above you on a rocket-powered motorbike, raining down destruction. It can be an intimidating place, but if you push past that barrier to entry, you’ll be rewarded with some of the best sandbox moments in GTA history.
With the release of The Contract, Rockstar hopes to strip away some of the friction preventing players from accessing the best content. You’ll still have to dodge JohnnyGamer69’s explosives on your way to missions, and you’ll still need plenty of in-game money to start the expansion, but at least you won’t be at the mercy of other players to kick it off – you can play all ten hours of it entirely solo if you want to.
“I just think having the option for players is a nice thing,” Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson explains. “It’s something that we’ve heard from players that they wanted more of. It’s tough sometimes if you want to just jump in and you’ve got to wait. So if we can make something work as a solo player, then we should. We often want to incentivize co-op play, but maybe not all the time – especially for this update. There’s as strong a narrative as we’ve had in any Online update since launch. There’s a story driving it.”
GTA Online started out as a prequel to GTA 5, the lengthy single-player portion of the game. With The Contract, the timeline has shifted forwards. Franklin Clinton – one of the three playable characters from the story mode – is back and more assured than ever, following his successful heist of the Union Depository. He’s set up a “celebrity solutions” agency and is fishing for a big client to increase the firm’s prestige. You join him as a silent partner – quite literally, since your GTA Online avatar doesn’t talk – and embark on a series of missions to find Dr. Dre’s phone, which has unreleased music on it. This is actually new music from Dre and his rapper friends, from Snoop Dogg to Eminem, and you’ll discover it as you play through the expansion.
Dre was heavily involved in The Contract’s creation, collaborating with Rockstar by sending music to match the vibes of specific missions. If you’ve seen the video of him rapping in a virtual studio in GTA Online, that’s actually Dre on Rockstar’s performance-capture stage.
“We built a studio on the mocap stage for him and sourced a board that he likes to use,” Nelson says. “He went in there, put the suit on, and did his thing. So it was really about going back and forth with him and his team and trying to get as much information as we could about his workflow, the type of equipment he likes to use, and then taking time to source it. So when he would come on set, it felt comfortable for him so we get the most authentic performance possible.”
A lot of what you can see in the clip is just Dre and Anderson .Paak improvising as they would in the studio. The idea was to capture the spirit of that creation process and allow players to feel like they’re in the room with hip-hop legends. Rockstar might be one of the most powerful, recognizable game studios in the world, but it still knows when respect is due – The Contract is a celebration of Dre’s talent and legacy.
“It sort of evolved over time and grew into what it was,” Nelson explains. “The idea was to work with Dre and figure out what we could do with him. The idea grew from that and it became more of a story-based thing. While we were working on it, it was already going to be an update. And so first we had him, he wanted to be involved, we wanted him involved, and we were talking with him about having new songs, a very special thing from Dre, who doesn’t release new stuff all that often.”
Rockstar didn’t want Dre’s appearance to be relegated to a small cameo, and it didn’t want to unceremoniously dump new Dre tracks in the game either. New music from one of the biggest West Coast rappers and producers of all time is huge, and this update needed to reflect the importance of the occasion.
“We needed to give ourselves the runway to do it properly,” Nelson continues. “We weren’t even sure when this update was going to land, whether it would be in the summer, now, or later. There were a lot of moving parts we needed to nail down. So once we knew we were going to be working with him, and we were going to feature the music, the next thing we needed to do was figure out how to integrate him into the world.
“The idea actually came through DJ Pooh, who’s already in our world as the host of the West Coast Classics radio station. We’ve known and worked with Pooh for a long time, he’s been friends with Dre for a very long time, and so we talked to him about ways we might be able to integrate Dre into it. So then we thought, well, Franklin could know Pooh and Lamar, and they could be connected in that way.”
The player character in GTA Online already knows Lamar, one of Franklin’s childhood friends and one of GTA 5’s best characters, so it’s a neat way to tie it all together. You’re introduced to Franklin through Lamar, Franklin introduces you to DJ Pooh, and Pooh makes the Dre connection.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of opportunities put in front of Dre,” Nelson says. “You hear him say in plenty of interviews, the way that he wants to work, it has to work for him. And so we took our time with it. That’s why there was no grand plan to make it a Gay Tony-style update. We’re going to build it around him and his character and what it needs to be.”
GTA is one of the biggest entertainment products in the world, but even Rockstar Games knows when it’s time to bow. We’ve seen artists perform songs in Fortnite, Imagine Dragons record the title song and pop up for a cameo in Netflix’s Arcane, and Grimes appear for some side missions in Cyberpunk 2077 – but there’s never been a game that’s built something around an artist quite like this.
“You know how much of a perfectionist he is, how reluctant he may be to release material until he knows it’s ready,” Nelson explains. “And then there’s what he’s become in the world and how successful he’s become outside of just making music, as a businessperson – everybody knows that about him.”
“When they told me what this story was going to be, I was really excited,” Franklin actor Shawn “Solo” Fonteno adds. “Dre’s a hall of famer, he’s a legend in the music business. I’ve known Dre for a long time. I worked with him before in a movie called The Wash that DJ Pooh directed. He wasn’t the same Dre back then to who he is now – he’s a big mogul now. I’m just happy to be working with him on a project like this.”
Rockstar wanted to play on that for The Contract, giving us the modern version of Dre – Dre the brand, rather than just Dre the rapper and producer. When working with him, that’s exactly what Rockstar got.
“Dre was sending us music, which is pretty amazing – him just firing over new songs and ideas and saying, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’” Nelson says. “In some cases, he had songs that he really felt strongly about and wanted to put out, and we found places for those. Other times he’d send something, and I thought it was great, and then he’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to use that one.’ It was a bit of a back and forth process, figuring out what should go where and where it will fit best.
“In-game, he’s a very successful client who’s lost that which is most precious to him, his music. He’s not able to go through normal channels to get that stuff back. How can you as the player, with your resources and expertise, help him retrieve these things? And that’s where the story came about. So it’s actually more suited to Online. Many players are heavily resourced individuals that can bring a lot of expertise, and Franklin is the face of the business, the connection maker. He says he misses getting his hands dirty, but he’s out there, hustling and making the deals.”
Franklin has grown a lot since the events of GTA V. He’s more self-assured, confident, and comfortable in his own skin when we meet him here.
“It was crazy to be stepping back in Franklin’s shoes after all this time,” Solo says. “How I felt when GTA V came out, I feel three times more excited. It feels like I got up. You know when you’re playing a video game and you get shot and you’re losing your energy and you pump that stuff in you? That’s how it feels, like I’m reliving again. My whole world just changed. Again.
“This is going to feel different for players. You’re not playing as Franklin, the player is helping him get his new agency set up. Franklin is a boss, he gets to call the shots now. I get to stick my chest out a little. Franklin’s a little more mature, like me. When all these high-power people in the game need something fixed, they go to Franklin. It feels good for me, this far out from GTA V and remembering all the scripts – the Franklin that I knew back then to where he’s landed felt good. To come from poverty, getting around Michael and Trevor was one step. Franklin took everything he learned from Michael, Lester, Trevor, Devin Weston, and all these people, and they’re a part of him now.”
GTA Online itself has had a similar character arc. At launch, it didn’t feel comfortable in its own skin – hell, it didn’t even have skin. It was barely a skeleton of the game it would eventually become.
“I would say it wasn’t even a skeleton – it was a twinkle in our eye,” Nelson laughs. “We didn’t know what it could become. We had hopes for it, and some of those things have been realized, some of them were not the correct direction to head. It really has been this back and forth between the players and ourselves, learning as we’re going. It’s been really challenging, but gratifying as developers to constantly have to be creative on this existing thing. We used to put a game out and then go dark for a number of years. This? We don’t have that option. We are on a regular cadence, but we still want to deliver big, surprising things for people. It’s just put us on a much, much shorter, tighter timeline. That’s been good discipline for us, and a good creative exercise.”
At launch, the engine that powered GTA Online wasn’t robust enough to handle heists – big, showstopping multiplayer activities where each player plays a role in a grand robbery – and it wasn’t great for layering in cutscenes to break up the action either. Video game development is never simple. Over that initial year, much of the work time was spent upgrading the engine alongside releasing content, making sure it played nice with cutscenes and allowed Rockstar to create the kind of high production value set-pieces the developer is known for.
“I think it was probably too busy at first, and then there weren’t enough little things for you to do in the world,” Nelson says. “We also didn’t have the infrastructure to do big things, and we needed to create that infrastructure so you can have big, wild storyline-type experiences. We just didn’t have that capability at the start. We didn’t necessarily think we would need it.”
Rockstar is always learning, be it from mistakes or tricks it discovers mid-development that inform later decisions and style choices in games. From the very first Grand Theft Auto, music has been an essential component of the experience. Think of A Flock of Seagulls and you likely remember the neon pinks of Vice City. Play Hollywood Swinging and you’re probably driving down the beach in San Andreas.
Over the years, Rockstar’s association with music has only grown, bringing in famous DJs and artists for collaborations and events. A whole storyline built around Dr. Dre could feel like stunt casting in any other game, but here it feels like a natural evolution.
In Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar really solidified its association with using music to heighten emotions in a scene. Around halfway into your journey, the story takes you across the American border and into Mexico. When you cross the threshold, a guitar softly strums. It’s a famous sequence now, but it’s important to remember just how critical Jose Gonzales’ Far Away was to making it memorable in the first place. There’s a technique in scoring called “spotting,” the process of deciding where within a movie or game the musical score will fit. It’s not just about the music itself – it’s about how you use it. That’s why we all remember John Marston’s first ride into Mexico, and it’s clear evidence of the fact Rockstar has had a knack for this kind of thing for over a decade.
“I remember where I was,” Nelson says. “I was in San Diego working on the game, but I didn’t know they had put it in. I played it and that happened. I started calling people saying, ‘Who did this? It’s amazing.’ They’re tricky moments to engineer. We had that Michael trip in GTA V, where Jimmy spikes his drink, where he’s falling – we’re figuring out the right song to match to that. There’s a great moment in Max Payne 3 with a Health song that comes on at the end in the airport terminal. And then a bunch of ones in Red Dead Redemption 2, from funny ones to hopefully emotional ones.”.
With The Contract, GTA Online is taking that a step further, lacing Los Santos with more LA vibes and building an entire storyline around musical discovery.
“This idea with Dre is, again, that he was fully integrated throughout the story,” Nelson explains. “And so you should be uncovering and hearing this new music as you play through the adventure – not getting it all at once, and placing some of these tracks throughout the missions. The way that they reveal themselves to you is something that I think is pretty special and perhaps even unique. We haven’t done it quite like this. Hopefully, people feel that as they play, and everyone may have a slightly different experience of the way these tracks get uncovered. There are a few surprises in this update.”
It’s pretty clear that this is a project made with California love – way beyond a simple promotional campaign. If you’ve ever been to LA, you’ll know that GTA V bottles up the essence of the place, from the orange glow of the sunset to the city views from atop the observatory. Dre, too, is intrinsically tied to the place – as inseparable as his 2001 album is from my own memories of the time. With the release of new music in GTA Online’s The Contract, you’ll only have to listen to the songs after you’ve played to be transported back.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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