A Year of Seasons: Embracing the Snowy Magic of Los Santos

At some point, my family developed a tradition of taking a New Year’s Day excursion. Most of the time we would set off along the coast, which was merely a brief getaway in itself. We wouldn’t venture far, and there wasn’t much to plan. It was simply the perfect way – relax, unwind, breathe – to usher in another year of whatever life had in store for us.

This year, we awoke to a tempest: rain pouring down, fences bending. An excursion was out of the question. Yet, faced with the option of a dreary day indoors, my spouse ignited GTA Online.

And behold! Los Santos was blanketed in snow. Flurries were drifting through the night sky, the palm trees were casting odd wintry silhouettes, and the entire area around Pillbox Hill was draped in white. Los Santos felt pristine and peculiar, imbued with that theatrical calmness that only fresh snow can bring to bustling places.

In the end, this turned out to be a delightful outing. Instead of cruising along the coastline, we spent the afternoon racing around in various vehicles that my partner called in from Johnny on the Spot. Ultimately, we secured a moped and settled into delivering pizzas. What a quirky experience this has become: thirty minutes spent darting back and forth along familiar streets, stopping at doorsteps we had never before noticed and earning $43k for our efforts. In Los Santos, pizza delivering brings in some serious cash.

But that thought: what a bizarre game this has morphed into. Over the years, GTA Online has transitioned from something chaotic and daunting to something that resembles Animal Crossing. When you time it right and engage with the right crowd, you aren’t getting headshot or blown out of the sky. Instead, you’re enjoying a cheerful ride in a landscape you’re beginning to know well, starting to feel a connection or a sense of ownership in it. We dive into GTA Online these days not necessarily to accomplish anything specific – often, we just play for the sake of it. We log in for the same reason I sometimes step into the garden. It’s a mild crime in a laid-back manner, just to see what’s happening.

This turned out to be an ideal way to welcome the new year: the environment was familiar, yet the snow made everything feel fresh and surprising once more. You can’t get a more genuine January 1st experience than that. Later that day, when I logged into Animal Crossing, which had also been blanketed with snow for the past few weeks, I thought: these worlds don’t seem so different after all. Or at least, they don’t have to be so dissimilar.

Yet there’s something more to it. A shift in the manner that video games have evolved as they’ve made the leap online. I recall years ago, my friend received an Xbox 360 just before Christmas, the year it was released. I stopped by for an evening to see what the new console was like, and he had Kameo running, yet all the fairies and pixies were sporting Santa hats. He explained that they had released a patch just in time for Christmas: this was a game that had launched earlier in the year, and yet here it was, acknowledging that we had reached a specific moment in time when Santa hats were suddenly relevant.

I experienced that same thrill of novelty after we loaded up GTA Online and discovered snow everywhere.