Are you a Radio Los Santos or Bounce FM enjoyer?
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.
