GTA 6 Could Learn a Few Lessons From Bully, Rockstar’s Schoolyard Gem

Everyone has their own expectations for Grand Theft Auto 6. While many hope it will live up to the dizzying standards set by GTA 5 and Read Dead Redemption 2, I’d actually like the next installment in the franchise to be less like recent hits and more like GTA 4, San Andreas, and the original Read Dead – games that had more restraint and, as a result, more focus. Above all, though, I wish the upcoming game would take a page from the textbook of one of the Rockstar’s most overlooked titles: Bully.

Developed by Rockstar Vancouver and released in 2006, Bully is often described as “GTA with kids”. Instead of a career criminal, you play as unruly teenager Jimmy Hopkins. The setting isn’t some big modern metropolis ruled by rival gangs, but a stuck-in-time New England-style boarding school (aptly named Bullworth Academy) where students are divided into different cliques like jocks and greasers. You steal bikes instead of cars, and when you break the rules, it’s not the cops that come for you, but headmasters and hall monitors.

Despite the critical and commercial success it enjoyed upon release, Bully is sometimes remembered as the “step child” or “black sheep” of Rockstar’s catalog. Not only do I disagree, I’d go as far as saying that Bully is actually Rockstar at its best: charming, atmospheric, and far removed from the direction the developer has taken since. Though similar to a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 on the surface, it was created with a completely different design philosophy, and that’s exactly why it’s the perfect blueprint for GTA 6 – a game that shouldn’t simply be “GTA 5, but more.”

Bigger isn’t always better. GTA 5’s map was larger than any other game in the franchise up to that point, but most of the area outside Los Santos turned out to be empty space. Unlike in, say, Red Dead 2, where the rolling meadows and barren mountainsides serve a thematic purpose, the backcountry of GTA 5 is not a living, breathing world so much as a playground for police chases and sandbox shenanigans.

Bully has one of the smallest maps of any Rockstar game, comprising only Bullworth Academy itself and the surrounding town. But because space is so limited, hardly any of it went to waste. The campus includes a library, gymnasium, and dormitories, while the town features a carnival, BMX park, and an insane asylum, to name just a few distinct and memorable locations. Put simply, Bully shows it isn’t the quantity of virtual space, but the quality of the content in it, that makes a game world feel believable and immersive.

Fortunately, there are already some indications that GTA 6’s design philosophy will harken back to Rockstar’s Bully days. Though the game’s map is rumored to be more than two and a half times as large as GTA 5’s, its Florida-inspired setting promises to create a much more striking and cohesive visual footprint that should compensate for any empty space.

Instead of a cookie-cutter Californian no man’s land, we’ll get Sunshine State idiosyncrasies: luxurious seaside boulevards, alligator-invested swamplands, state-of-the-art theme parks, and white beaches littered with the worst kinds of tourists. GTA 5 gave us a bastardized version of Los Angeles and little else; GTA 6 will draw inspiration from a variety of specific real-world cities and biomes, including Miami, Tampa, Orlando, the Keys, the Everglades, and more.

I don’t think we should be free to dive into those varied locations from the off, though. Bully demonstrates the value of limiting player freedom – another quality of open-world design that’s long fallen out of fashion. In GTA 5, you need only complete Franklin’s prologue before you’re free to explore the map in its entirety. But this lack of restriction comes at a cost, as reaching a location that’s always been accessible to you isn’t nearly as satisfying as visiting a place that you were previously unable to get to.

Older Rockstar games did this constantly, and to great effect. San Andreas takes you to three different cities, each of them unlocked at different parts of the story. Similarly, the original Red Dead doesn’t let you go to Mexico until several hours into the game (though there are admittedly one or two ways to glitch yourself across the border). Its sequel also restricts player freedom to some degree, keeping the prologue confined to the snowy Grizzlies West region.

In Bully, you cannot leave Bullworth Academy until the second chapter. Far from annoying, this setup gives you an opportunity to thoroughly explore the school, which will remain your base of operations throughout the game. Better still, the map opens up at a moment when you are just beginning to get bored of the place. Because we were made to yearn for a change of scenery, our newfound freedom tastes all the sweeter.

GTA 6 will hopefully return to the days of gated regions. While Vice City is clearly the game’s key metropolis, I’d like to see it as an aspirational destination – a land of neon lights, loose values, and criminal profit that takes a little work to get to. Places like Port Gellhorn and the Leonida Keys could be stepping stones to the big city, just as San Andreas had us master Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas in sequence.

This leads into another, even more valuable lesson that GTA 6 can learn from Bully. In GTA 5, there is a huge disconnect between you and the characters you control. Except for when we play as Trevor, whose volatile personality not only reflects but actively encourages the most haphazardly destructive way to play the game, we rarely get to experience a character’s emotions along with them.

In Bully, story and gameplay mechanics work side by side to make you identify with Jimmy and share his motivations. After being confined to campus grounds for the first chapter, he’s eager to go into town. You’re excited too – so excited, in fact, that you’ll probably spend a solid hour vibing, riding around on a stolen bike before starting the next mission.

Another mechanic that helps ease you into Jimmy’s shoes is the game’s curfew system. After 11 p.m., the school becomes overrun with prefects who’ll send you to bed if they catch you, filling up your Trouble Meter (the higher the meter, the more suspicious and hostile certain NPCs will behave towards you). Avoiding punishment puts you on edge, while making it back to the safety of your dormitory draws out a sigh of relief.

Emotional responses like these are hard to come by in GTA 5, where the frequent over-the-top police chase action quickly turns numbingly mundane. The same cannot be said for GTA 4 or San Andreas, where character writing and plot development actually made you care for their protagonists. In Bully, the lower stakes and slightly subtler tone allow events to escalate at a more gradual, satisfying pace, ensuring the story remains engaging right until the final face-off with its main antagonist, a sociopathic, unmedicated fellow student named Gary.

Unlike its predecessor, GTA 6 does seem poised to treat its playable characters as actual people rather than vehicles for chaos and carnage. Dual protagonists Lucia and Jason, we’re told over and over, will be Bonnie and Clyde-style partners in crime, and as in Bully, story and gameplay could conspire to put the player in the middle of that no doubt complicated relationship.

Perhaps the most important thing that Bully can teach GTA 6 is the importance of restraint when designing a game. Rockstar wanted GTA 5 to be big – as big as it possibly could be, both in terms of content and appeal. But by prioritizing size and variety, the developers gave the game a much weaker sense of identity than GTA 4 or San Andreas, both of which were made with very different goals in mind.

Thanks to the specificity of its setting, Bully has perhaps the strongest identity and atmosphere of any Rockstar game out there. Though full of over-the-top caricatures, Bullworth Academy can be a genuinely oppressive place – the kind of harsh environment that forces an otherwise well-intentioned kid like Jimmy to toughen up and treat others as shiftily as they treat him.

The feelings a game evokes stay with you long after you finish playing, strengthening your memory of the overall experience. Though I haven’t done a full playthrough of Bully in years, I can still picture Bullworth Academy’s layout in my head. But drop me anywhere in GTA 5’s gigantic backcountry – a place I have spent many more hours – and I’d struggle finding my way back to civilization without looking at the mini-map.

Despite persistent pleading from the game’s cult following, Bully is unlikely to receive a sequel any time soon. Gone are the days when individual subsidiaries like Rockstar Vancouver (long since part of Rockstar Toronto) could work on their own, original IPs. Whatever Rockstar’s next game will be, it almost certainly won’t be Bully 2. Still, if Rockstar has found a way to inject additional purpose and show extra restraint in its new massive open world, there’s a small chance that the franchise’s feisty spirit will live on through Grand Theft Auto 6.

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.