GTA roleplay’s latest craze has players risking their cars in tense bouts of high-stakes hide and seek

My newest obsession in GTA 5 roleplay is playing hide-and-seek with other players, and allowing the winner to smash up the other’s vehicle because, well, having nice things in this game has never really been the done thing.

And so I find myself gunning it down the Los Santos freeway in my banged up Beater tow truck with a knot in my stomach. It took me six freaking months of mind-numbing garbage collection to afford the wheels I’ve since affectionately named Rusty. Having fallen deep into the new craze I’ve found sweeping pockets of the Grand Theft Auto RP scene of late, what, I’m supposed to just let some rando smash up my prized possession simply because I’m rubbish at hide-and-seek?

The answer to this question is, quite simply, yes. And so following my crisis of conscience, I pull over to the side of the road and hang a U-turn.

I’m now heading back to the scene—the construction site in Pillbox Hill, Downtown Los Santos—to face my fate. I lost fair and square… not that this makes watching ‘YEPYEP2006’ smashing up my ride, Street Fighter 2 bonus stage style, any easier to bear. You dirty bastard.

It’s a sore one, for me and my in-game bank balance, given that my truck was not insured.

Unlike vanilla GTA Online, fixing your car in Grand Theft Auto roleplay is not a simple case of calling up Mors Mutual, hitting a few buttons and treating yourself to a mobile pay-and-spray. In most RP servers, it’s instead a process of ringing another real-life player and having them pick up your vehicle, tow it to a garage, charge you an absolute fortune for repairs and then send you on your merry way.

With a grand total of $1,250 in my current account – a week’s worth of garbage collection wages and a shade shy of the $9,000 required to get ol’ Rusty back on the tarmac – betting my car in a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek suddenly seems ill-advised. Which is, of course, a huge part of the buzz tied to my latest roleplay obsession.

You see, I won the last three games. After a gruelling 15-minute session inside Michael De Santa’s villa, I out-foxed one player by climbing onto the GTA 5 Story Mode protagonist’s red-slate roof before lying prone behind a chimney stack. On another outing, an Elyssian Island nightclub proved a formidable fortress. Here, on the third floor of the perpetually unfinished Mile High Club skyscraper complex, a palette of black plastic four-inch waste piping was not adequate, truck-saving cover—a sentence that, after 11 years of GTA Online on PC, I did not expect to write.

What never fails to impress me, though, are the sublime and ridiculous ways inventive players have somehow managed to keep things fresh in GTA 5 and GTA Online. For the last several years, I’ve revelled in everything the game’s offshoot player-made roleplay scene has thrown at me, and yet something as simple of hide-and-seek in a world I know so well has sunk its hooks deep into me.

There’s a nostalgic value tied to it all—from prop hunt in Garry’s Mod to actual hide-and-seek in my real-life primary school days 30-odd years ago. And, of course, poor old Rusty. Goodnight sweet prince and back to the waste management facility I go. And if you find yourself playing hide-and-seek in a GTA roleplay server soon, make sure you’ve splashed for car insurance ahead of time.