Debate: Which Grand Theft Auto radio station has the best tunes?
Welcome to Soundtrack Sunday, where a member of the PC Gamer team takes a look at a soundtrack from one of their favourite games—or a broader look at videogame music as a whole—offering their thoughts or asking for yours!
Ah, licensed music in videogames. An embarrassingly big contributor to my music taste over the years, highly favoured among the sports sims, episodic videogames, and open world free roam ditties à la Sleeping Dogs and Grand Theft Auto.
The latter is where I've ingested all kinds of music over the years, broadening my tastes to genres I never thought I would have bothered listening to. As a raging emo in the 2000s, the Grand Theft Auto games were my gateway to stuff I never would have listened to otherwise like hip-hop, country, and house.
That's thanks to the myriad of fictional radio stations that Rockstar has crafted over the years—it started introducing a large chunk of licensed music to its radio stations in Vice City—with carefully curated playlists that do so much for each game's worldbuilding and general vibes. Nothing beats cruising down roads in Vice City while '80s bangers like Out of Touch by Hall & Oates play, or diving into San Andreas' excellent East Coast hip-hop library with Biz Markie and Public Enemy.
If you're anything like me, some radio stations will have stuck with you more than others. Country music is perhaps the very last genre I would voluntarily listen to in my day-to-day life, but I have so many fond memories of blasting K-Rose while playing San Andreas. It's my go-to radio station every time I boot that game up.
There's something about host Mary-Beth Maybell sharing far too many details about her life ("you ever stick your entire arm up a cow?") before going into the likes of All my Ex's Live in Texas, a song that regularly worms its way into my brain for days on end despite never listening to it outside the confines of the game.
Mine is probably K-DST in San Andreas, which is the only reason I'm familiar with a whole bunch of classic rock.
Maybe it's recency bias though, but by far my favourite station has to be Grand Theft Auto 5's Non-Stop Pop FM. It's hosted by Cara Delevingne with the kind of weirdly pleasant wooden performance I'd expect from the British model—though she certainly calls me out with the line "This is the home for all the music you used to pretend not to like back when you were trying to be cool. You weren't cool."
The station is stuffed with pop bangers over three decades—Amerie's 1 Thing, Britney Spears' Gimme More, Lorde's Tennis Court—and one of my fondest memories of Grand Theft Auto Online comes from a late-night lockdown heist where I uttered the words to my partner-in-crime: "I hope to God they play Backstreet Boys," before flicking the radio on to I Want It That Way. It was the perfect post-diamond heist soundtrack as we drove back to base, most definitely annoying our real-life neighbours with our 3am warbling.
But with dozens of radio stations to choose from, am I right in crowning Non-Stop Pop FM as the reigning champion of the virtual airwaves, or have I blatantly missed far more iconic transmissions I should be tuning into instead?
Be sure to comment your favourite GTA radio station below, and let us know why it's the best of the best.