You'll soon be able to watch a Grand Theft Auto Online production of Hamlet in theatres across the US as Machinima achieves total cultural victory

GRAND THEFT HAMLET clip | BFI London Film Festival 2024 - YouTube

Who was the best Hamlet? Laurence Olivier? Richard Burton? Henry Irving? None of the above. It's XxX_5pud5m4sh3r_XxX, who has tragically never completed a performance due to being executed by headshot halfway through the play every time.

That may not be the actor's actual name, but it is, I gather, the gist of Grand Theft Hamlet, an attempt to produce perhaps the most famous play in history "entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto." It's coming to artsy movie streaming service Mubi in the near future and, more confusingly, will also be showing in theatres across the USA.

An innovative, immersive take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, shot entirely inside the world of Grand Theft Auto, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s festival hit GRAND THEFT HAMLET is coming soon to US theaters + streaming globally. pic.twitter.com/6FMYCt5423October 10, 2024

Specifically, entirely inside Grand Theft Auto Online, a task whose impossibility will be obvious to anyone who's ever fired that game up. So far as I can tell, the film is one part Hamlet production, one part documentary about how completely doomed it is to attempt to stage a Hamlet production inside GTAO. Quoth the synopsis: "this documentary charts the hilarious and profoundly moving story of two out of work actors as they try to stage a full production of Hamlet within this notoriously violent digital world."

The trailer for it is not really a trailer. It's a gameplay clip showcasing our two protagonists attempting to act out Hamlet at GTA 5's Vinewood Bowl. All the while players in the audience kill each other, kill the actors, and summon the cops, before eventually the whole thing collapses as the LSPD crash proceedings in a helicopter.

We used to have a word for this kind of thing. We called it Machinima, and it consisted of people putting in frankly staggering effort to create whole TV shows inside the confines of videogames. Red vs Blue, Civil Protection, Half-Life: Full Life Consequences—this was my media diet when I was a dewy-eyed teenager. Seeing it suddenly pop up at film festivals and win actual awards at SXSW makes me feel like some kind of medieval peasant watching his cheap staple meal suddenly become fashionable haute cuisine.

Grand Theft Hamlet is coming to a streaming service, and perhaps a theatre, near you "soon."

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.