“GTA College History” Is Here: How One Course Uses Grand Theft Auto to Teach 45 Years of America

“GTA College History” sounds like a meme class until you look under the hood. Beginning January 2026, the University of Tennessee will offer Grand Theft America: U.S. History Since 1980 through the GTA Video Games, a full-fledged undergraduate history course devised by Professor Tore Olsson (the same historian who previously taught a wildly popular Red Dead Redemption class). Rather than treating Rockstar’s crime saga as an object of fandom, the course uses Grand Theft Auto’s cities, soundtracks, talk radio, news gags, and story beats as a prism for understanding how the United States has changed since the 1980s.

Below, we break down what makes this approach rigorous, why GTA’s satire can be a surprisingly reliable guide to real social change, what you’d actually do in a class like this, and why GTA College History may be a sign of where humanities teaching is headed.

Why Grand Theft Auto works in a history classroom

At first glance, Grand Theft Auto is pure parody: outrageous violence, absurd radio ads, and caricatures of media, politics, and celebrity. But consider the sweep of the series:

• Vice City Stories (1984) and Vice City (1986) evoke late-Cold War Miami: cocaine money, culture wars, Reagan-era deregulation, pastel glamour, and TV-driven celebrity.

• San Andreas (1992) channels the West Coast in the early 1990s: the crack epidemic’s aftermath, mass incarceration, gang truces and turf wars, privatization, and the spark of civil unrest after police brutality trials.

• Liberty City Stories (1998), GTA III (2001), GTA IV (2008), and GTA V (2013) chart the twenty-first century: financialization, the War on Terror’s cultural hangover, talk-radio polarization, social media bravado, and a real-estate economy gone supernova.

A franchise born in 1997 now spans nearly three decades of releases and half a century of American history in its fictional timelines. When a historian walks students through GTA’s satire with primary sources and data, the jokes stop floating and start landing on something concrete: deindustrialization and containerization, immigration patterns, CEO-to-worker pay, mass media deregulation, suburban sprawl and urban policing, the carceral state, and post-industrial tourism economies. In other words, the series is a surprisingly coherent cultural map of the era we live in.

What the course actually covers (it’s more “America” than “games”)

Professor Olsson describes GTA College History as an American history class first, with GTA acting as its framework—a set of case studies and prompts that make otherwise abstract trends vivid. Students are not required to own or play any GTA title; no one’s being tested on “Who is Trevor Philips?” Instead, the course uses:

• Recorded gameplay, screenshots, and curated clips (e.g., loading containers at the Port of Los Santos or driving through a gentrifying neighborhood) to open lectures.

• Historical readings—news archives, census data, policy documents, oral histories—that anchor the fiction in facts.

• Comparative media—radio segments from different decades, TV news, and political ads—to contextualize GTA’s evolving satire of talk radio and cable news.

Expect modules like:

1. Deregulation & the Media (1980s)GTA’s one-station free-for-all in the Vice City era contrasts with the splintered, hyper-partisan dial of GTA IV and V—a teachable arc that tracks with the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal and the rise of personality-driven news.

2. Deindustrialization & the Port EconomyThe series’ obsession with docks and container yards (“the orifice of American capitalism,” as GTA V wryly puts it) opens a door to the story of containerization, outsourcing, and the transformation of American labor markets since the 1970s.

3. Urban Policing, Crime, and PanicSan Andreas climaxes with a Los Santos uprising that alludes to the 1992 L.A. Riots, giving the instructor a launchpad for the long backstory: policing innovations, the War on Drugs, local political coalitions, and the mutual misunderstandings that followed televised brutality and acquittals.

4. Inequality & the New Gilded AgeFrom Liberty City’s ruthless brokers to Los Santos’s real-estate fetish, GTA mirrors the economy’s tilt toward finance and property. Students examine the data: CEO-to-worker pay ratios rising from ~25:1 around 1980 to hundreds-to-one today, regional wealth gaps, and the politics that accompanied them.

5. Immigration, Culture, and BelongingWith protagonists like Niko Bellic and a backdrop that constantly riffs on multicultural America, GTA lets the class trace how the foreign-born share of the U.S. population roughly tripled since 1980—and how policy and culture wrestled with that reality.

6. Digital Spectacle & the SelfGTA V’s Vinewood and social media parodies set up a discussion of the post-2007 smartphone era, attention economies, influencer culture, and the commodification of everyday life.

What GTA gets wrong—and why that’s useful

A historian’s job isn’t to worship a text; it’s to question it. GTA’s America is exaggerated, and often ugly. Crime rates in many cities fell steeply from the 1990s into the late 2010s; GTA rarely shows suburbs (or their traffic), compressing the urban experience; women and people of color can be underwritten or stereotyped in ways that reflect old media habits more than lived realities. Rather than disqualifying the series, those distortions become teachable moments: why does the myth of American cities as constant warzones persist? Who benefits from that perception? How does satire amplify a truth—and when does it obscure one?

In short, the course treats GTA like any other cultural artifact that shaped public imagination—no different in principle from studying film noir to understand post-war anxiety or rock music to understand generational change.

The elephant in the classroom: GTA 6

Yes, the class arrives before GTA 6 (delayed to May 2026). That’s not a problem. Between the 1980s-set Vice titles, San Andreas’ 1992 lens, and the 2000s-2010s beats of III/IV/V, there’s already a clear arc from Reagan to reality TV. When GTA 6 finally lands, the curriculum can fold in its take on Miami in the 2020s—climate risk, hyper-tourism, housing bubbles, and social video virality—extending the conversation rather than starting it.

A sample week inside “GTA College History”

Week Topic: Los Santos Will Burn Tonight—Policing, Protest, and the 1992 L.A. RiotsWarm-up (10 mins): Short San Andreas clip of the acquittal broadcast and ensuing unrest; quick audio from real 1992 newscasts.Lecture (25 mins):

• Policing reforms and street-crime politics from the late 1960s onward

• The War on Drugs and sentencing policy

• Local L.A. dynamics: community-police relations, economic change, and media narrativesPrimary sources (20 mins):

• Excerpts from Christopher Commission report

• Newspaper front pages, eyewitness testimonies, 1990 census neighborhood dataSeminar (30 mins):

• What truths does San Andreas grasp—and what does it miss?

• How did changes in media (camcorders, local news) shape the riots’ national meaning?

• In what ways did the policy aftermath address (or fail to address) root causes?Assignment: 800-word synthesis: compare San Andreas’ depiction with two primary sources; identify one real-world trend the game amplifies and one it distorts.

Assessment without gatekeeping

Students aren’t graded on controller skills. Typical assessments:

• Short response essays tying GTA scenes to specific statistics or policies

• Source analyses (ads, radio transcripts, congressional hearings)

• Mapping exercises (redlining overlays, port logistics, suburban expansion)

• Capstone: a multimedia presentation—pair one GTA motif with a historical debate (e.g., “From shipping containers to shuttered plants: How logistics remade U.S. work”).

The goal isn’t to canonize a video game—it’s to equip students to read popular culture critically, connect it to the material world, and articulate change over time.

Addressing concerns: seriousness, violence, and respect

A course like this only works if the classroom is professional and humane. That means:

• No “edgelord” culture: the tone stays scholarly; tasteless content is filtered; jokes are interrogated, not celebrated.

• Anti-violence lens: the through-line is human dignity—understanding how institutions, incentives, and stories produce division or solidarity.

• Accessibility: no purchases required; all materials are provided or shown in class.

• Context first: satire is never left to “speak for itself”; it’s translated through documents, data, and lived histories.

Why “GTA College History” matters (beyond the headline)

• It validates games as cultural texts—not as toys, but as literature with physics engines.

• It trains media literacy: students learn to decode the politics of entertainment in an era when entertainment often is politics.

• It makes the 1980-present era legible: many intro surveys end around 1975; this class lives in the decades students actually inhabit.

• It’s scalable: other campuses can adapt the model—The Wire for urban policy, FIFA for globalized labor markets, Fortnite/Roblox for platform economies—without sacrificing rigor.

If your campus wanted to copy this, here’s a starter kit

• Core readings: selections on deregulation (communications policy), logistics and containerization, immigration since 1965, mass incarceration, inequality, and media polarization.

• Media pairings: GTA radio monologues by decade, news clips, campaign ads, city planning maps.

• Assignments: three short analyses + one research-based multimedia project.

• Tech: instructor-provided clips; no game purchases; accessibility captions and content notes.

Frequently asked (and easy) questions

Do students need a console or the games?No. The instructor supplies all video and images needed for discussion.

Is it just “fun and games”?It’s a regular graded history course with reading, writing, and analysis—using GTA as a case study framework.

What about students who dislike GTA or find it offensive?They don’t need to like the games. The course analyzes representation critically and is explicit about boundaries, context, and respectful engagement.

Will GTA 6 be included?Not in the first run (it releases after the semester begins), but future iterations will incorporate it.

Final lap: from Los Santos to the lecture hall

The arrival of GTA College History doesn’t mean humanities have surrendered to pop culture; it means they’re finally meeting students where they already are—inside mediated worlds that powerfully shape how they understand real ones. In the right hands, a mission at the Port of Los Santos becomes an on-ramp to global supply chains; a chaotic news broadcast becomes an entry point to media law; a storyline about neighborhood control becomes a seminar on policing, protest, and policy.

You don’t need to love Grand Theft Auto to see the promise here. You just have to accept a simple premise: stories people care about are the best vehicles for teaching the history they need to know. If that vehicle happens to be a cherry-red Infernus weaving through Vice City at sunset—well, buckle up.