I’m modding GTA 5 every day until it becomes GTA 6 or breaks, starting with a new vehicle and enough missiles to level a city block

Well, we’ve been hornswoggled again. They did it. They’re doing it. Rockstar is, as we speak, putting the finishing touches on Grand Theft Auto 6, the Final Videogame, but icing you and me out entirely. No Xbox or PlayStation? Enjoy pressing your nose against the glass of your console-owning neighbours as they find themselves delighted and transformed by the world’s first $500,000,000,000,000 entertainment product.

I say: no. Not today, Sam (or maybe Dan) Houser. Every day, I am going to add a new mod to Grand Theft Auto 5, until it either becomes GTA 6 or collapses under its own terrible weight. If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad will slowly alter a separate, but nearer mountain until it’s indistinguishable from the one he wanted.

Today, day one, is mostly about learning. I have plenty of experience modding, but only really in games designed for it. I get the impression Rockstar would prefer no one change its babies, and so modding GTA 5 feels iffy and ramshackle: a process of gathering .asi files and hacky tools and crowbarring your way into the game’s guts. Also, all the mods’ instructions consist of a .txt file that says ‘put mods’. Great. Excellent. Thank you.

It’s a learning experience. So, to learn, and to start slow, I figured I would begin with something simple: a new vehicle. A fresh set of wheels to cruise the hot tarmac of Los Santos. It needed to be fast, stylish, fashionable, and stand out at least a little from the usual bric-a-brac of sedans and sports cars that litter Rockstar’s fake-LA.

I settled on the HQ-16 (simplified Chinese: 红旗-16; traditional Chinese: 紅旗-16; pinyin: Hóng Qí-16; lit. ‘Red Banner-16’; NATO reporting name: CH-SA-16) Chinese medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM), developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology*.

This screenshot was taken a little after the adventures described here, so please interpret that blue health bar as a sneak preview. (Image credit: Rockstar)

I mostly did this because I wanted to familiarise myself with tools like OpenIV and make sure I could configure a mod and a few dependencies without everything blowing up in my face. I partly did it because I wanted to expose the people of Beverly Hills to the full might of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and the military of Pakistan. They’ve been coddled for too long.

Even more partly, I did it because a mod that was meant to change Franklin into Chester Bennington from Linkin Park kept making the game crash.

It worked. Before long, Los Santos was engulfed in waves of Shanghai Academic fire. Celebrity homes? Gone. Celebrity cars? Gone. Cops? Immolated. Their helicopters? Destroying those is literally what this vehicle is for. I was a one-man army in the truck of a regular several-men army, and the cops could do nothing to stop me. At least, until one of them attempted to pull me from my car—placing them right next to the driver’s door when one of my many missiles found its way home to the small of his back.

Artist’s recreation. (Image credit: Rockstar)

I bet this never happened when the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation were testing this thing.

But my lessons are complete. I can mod GTA 5 without destroying anything. Today, a destructive truck. Tomorrow? Something more. Tune in to find out what.

*Thank you Wikipedia.