Images of Grand Theft Auto V by Lukasz Pilch
Grand Theft Auto fan Lukasz Pilch owns a shitty laptop. It shouldn't have been capable of running Grand Theft Auto V, a huge and sprawling technical marvel. And yet, thanks to a series of tweaks that purposely make GTA V look like garbage, Pilch managed to beat it.
"I literally closed my eyes and launched the game while praying for it to work," he told me, recalling the moment he decided to download a copy of GTA V and load it up on his machine.
As he booted it up, menu after menu proclaimed his laptop could not pull this off. But Pilch was not deterred. Miraculously, the game launched, and Pilch almost jumped out of his seat. Then, reality set in: Even with everything brought down to the lowest possible settings, it wasn't playable. At times, the game was crawling forward at a ridiculous eight frames-per-second. On PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, GTA V runs at 30 frames-per-second. Eight is not very good.
"I live in Poland. Laptops and PC hardware aren't really cheap here," said Pilch. "Building a decent PC costs way more than in the US or other countries in Western Europe."
Pilch scoured the Internet for tools that could help him to... well, make the game look worse! By using hacks to turn off the fancy effects that make modern games so pretty, it stands a chance on old hardware. The images in this article are taken from Pilch's playthrough of GTA V, but it's not how the developers pitched their game. Though the creators of GTA V may be happy to take Pilch's money, they may be less happy to see the game looking like ass. But hey, now he can play it.
Eventually, Pilch got the frame rate to hover between 13 and 27 frames-per-second. Good? No. Acceptable for someone who's used to playing games this way? Yes. There were tons of unexpected glitches—cutscenes would get wildly out of sync, some roads simply disappeared, the game would appear to freeze for nearly a minute, before sputtering back to life—but it ran.
"I did actually enjoy the game," he said. "It was an ugly mess with horrible input delay, but the story, the characters, the soundtrack and fun physics were still there. Maybe someday I will revisit this game in all of it's glory."
"I was immensely frustrated by the existing and currently very strong narrative online of PC gamers being the 'master race.' I just didn't know if anyone would care about it."
With nearly 100,000 YouTube subscribers, it's clear that Alex is onto something. Though PC gaming may be marketed as a high-class alternative to consoles, the customization of PC hardware is, by definition, what a person makes of it. Sometimes that means running a game at 4K resolutions at 120 frames-per-second. Sometimes it means making games look like crap simply because you want to do the most important thing: Play the damn game.
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