One of the NFL’s best teams is full of Grand Theft Auto Online roleplayers

The Eagles have had a great season, and the team's players love GTA Online.

The Eagles have had a great season, and the team's players love GTA Online.

We’re not living in the Dark Ages of Tipper Gore and “special episodes” of Law and Order anymore⁠—gaming’s gone mainstream, and we’ll all one day live to see the first gamer president, God have mercy on our souls. Still, you kind of expect high-profile gamers in non-gaming fields to be into more normie, palatable stuff: Madden, CoD, WoW, etc.

According to a recent report by the New York Times (readers may encounter a paywall), some star members of the Philadelphia Eagles are getting a little more funky with it, chilling out after work on modded GTA Online roleplay servers.

The players describe a familiar scene⁠—you get done with your nine-to-five and want to occupy yourself with literally anything else. The NYT report singles out safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and running back Kenneth Gainwell as the team’s most dedicated gamers. Both maintain their own RP servers and stream regularly on Twitch, and Gardner-Johnson’s streaming set-up is quoted as costing $10,000.

The report doesn’t go into too much detail about what an average Eagles GTA session looks like, but there are some tantalizing tidbits. Gardner-Johnson mains a business owner and a police officer on his server, and apparently running back Miles Sanderson’s character got locked up in the clinger on that same server.

It sounds like a good time to be honest, and I’m a big fan of how esoteric and nerdy it all is. It reminds me of PC Gamer favorite Henry Cavill’s well-documented love affair with PC and tabletop gaming, just really niche and really genuine. Also, I gotta say I take a bit of pride at seeing cool, successful people who share my hobby. The Eagles are definitely doing something right, too⁠—they’re currently 11-1 in the regular season. 

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