He created Grand Theft Auto. Dan Houser was one of the masterminds behind revolutionary video game series Grand Theft Auto. Now, after leaving Rockstar Games and launching his own company, he's released a debut novel about a very different type of game. A Better Paradise is a dystopian vision of the near future in which an AI-led computer game goes rogue. Set in a polarised world, it finds Mark Tyburn attempting to create a virtual haven for people to find sanctuary and reconnect within themselves against an all-consuming social media hellscape.

Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. In July this year workers at Build a Rocket Boy, a video game studio in Edinburgh, were called to an all-staff meeting. Their first ever game, a sci-fi adventure called MindsEye, had been released three weeks earlier - and it had been a total disaster. Critics and players called it broken, buggy, and the worst game of 2025. Addressing staff via video link, the company's boss, Leslie Benzies, assured them there was a plan to get things back on track and said the negativity they'd seen was uncalled for.

Last week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was "Shakespeare would be writing for games today", which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense. Shakespeare worked in the Elizabethan theatre, a period in which plays were considered popularist entertainment hardly worthy of analysis or preservation – just like video games today! The authorities were also concerned about the lewd and violent nature of plays and the effect they may have on the impressionable masses – ditto! But if we agree that a 21st-century Shakespeare would be making games, what sort would he be making?

Young cast member Nora has benefited from this opportunity. She openly thanks those in game for giving her the opportunity to act and express herself freely, particularly as someone going through a gender transition. "It's amazing that her first production experience of Shakespeare, beyond studying in school, was in Grand Theft Auto," Grylls says. "That's what kept us going really, the fact people kept coming back because they wanted to." Grylls, Crane and Oosterveen's committed madness has paid off.

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world. But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical. Founded in Irvine, California, by two UCLA students named Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, the company quickly became well respected and popular thanks to a series of breakout franchises such as StarCraft and Diablo. But everything changed in 2004 with the launch of World of Warcraft (or WoW), which became an online-gaming juggernaut that made billions of dollars.

The bouncy, midi melody of Nintendo's Wii theme descends into a drill beat. A Game Boy Colour opens up into a lip gloss case. ASAP Rocky goes "full Minecraft" in a pixelated hoodie, and a panting man bobs up and down with his arm stuck in a bush. This is not a glitch. Both online and IRL, pop culture is embracing the aesthetics of retro gaming.

Sam Crane was in the middle of doing Macbeth when the bullets started flying. A veteran of the British stage, Crane was on the verge of playing the lead in the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when COVID-19 shut down live performances, and by the U.K.'s third lockdown, he was itching for an audience. So instead of playing to a West End crowd, he found himself orating to a smattering of heavily armed lawbreakers inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. "If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other," he calls out amid the tomorrows and tomorrows. "And don't kill the actors either!"

Last week, Microsoft completed its $69bn purchase of Activision Blizzard, sealing a deal that many called the biggest in video game history (although they are overlooking the 1965 merger of Nihon Goraku Bussan and Rosen Enterprises to form the glorious Sega Enterprises, but let's not get into that). Microsoft was keen to slightly downplay the significance of the moment in its own press release, pointing out that it will become only, "the world's third-largest [emphasis my own] gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony". However, we all understand the awesome power it now wields, with Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Candy Crush Saga under its command. How will this affect us, the gamers? Not much to begin with.

It's been a giant week for video game news. Nintendo announced a release date of 5 May 2023 for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, certainly not an intentional reference to the death of the Queen); we've seen a new God of War: Ragnarok trailer in which The West Wing's Toby Ziegler shouts at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally, finally coming back. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar's internal Slack channel. The hacker claims to have possession of the game's source code, too. This is, along with the theft of Half-Life 2's source code from Valve in 2003, one of the biggest data breaches in video game history.

The proposed purchase of Zynga is some $4.1 billion more than Chinese conglomerate Tencent paid for an 81.4 percent majority in Finland's Supercell -- another mobile game maker that developed the Clash of Clans franchise -- in 2016. That deal of $9.274 billion served as the previous high mark for acquiring video game company. In 2020, Microsoft acquired ZeniMax Media, which includes highly-regarded game maker Bethesda Softworks, for $8.1 billion. In 2015, Activision Blizzard paid $5.9 billion to acquire King, the mobile game maker behind "Candy Crush."