‘Grand Theft Auto’ Goes Gay for New Expansion

The next Grand Theft Auto expansion has officially been announced, and without a doubt it’s the most fabulous entry into the series yet. The DLC pack is called Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony and is already causing a bit of controversy.

Before you jump to conclusions, the game isn’t being as progressive as to feature a gay character as the lead, rather players take control of Luis Lopez, a “problem solver” for nightclub lothario Tony “Gay Tony” Prince. The game is based around the glitzy nightlife scene of Liberty City, but will surely involve copious amounts of automatic weapons fire regardless.

The game hasn’t drawn any fire from conservative groups…yet, but I’m guessing they haven’t really heard that it exists at this point. The controversy instead stems from the fact that Microsoft is greenlighting a game to be sold on XBL with “gay” in the title, yet they’re still refusing to let gamers have words like “gay,” “queer” or “lesbian” in their gamertags, which has been a hot button issue in the past.

I really don’t believe that Microsoft has that rule in place to discriminate against gay gamers, because 95% of the uses of those words in Gamertags would mostly likely be the work of preteens thinking they’re being funny. I think Microsoft thinks that the freeing up of these words would do more harm than good to the gay community, thanks to the mostly idiotic XBL community, and I would tend to agree with their current stance. They’re just not explaining themselves very well.

But anyways, back to Gay GTA. It certainly is progress of some sort to have “gay” in the title of such a major franchise as Grand Theft Auto, and I suppose we should be thankful for little victories.

The Ballad of Gay Tony hits XBL in the fall for $20.

[via Kotaku]