I don't play GTA, but I got a copy of Vice City just so I could park the car and listen to the in-game radio.

And what royally sucks is that Rockstar is not negotiating their licensing anymore on their older games, so the newer versions of the GTA series (PC and mobile re-releases) don't have all the music anymore due to rights issues.

best radio of all the GTAs imo

Man, the radio in Vice City was just amazing to me. Many of the commercials and talk shows were genuinely funny and the selection of music fit the setting perfectly. They just did such a damn good job on it. Lots of games have since tried to replicate it but none have done it nearly as well from what I've seen.

The only game I've ever played where the radio even came CLOSE to GTA-level was a really obscure (but really underrated) vehicle combat game on the Xbox called RoadKill. The songs were nothing special (mostly material produced for the game) but the fake radio chatter and talkshow stuff was legitimately great and in-universe. That game was a blast, but it's basically dropped off the earth now. I regret getting rid of my copy some years back; for being basically the first and only attempt (that I am aware of) to merge open world with vehicle combat, it is surprisingly good.

That was a whole other panic in the 80s, remember? "Jap Panic?" Where the Japanese were going to take over the country via business and we were all going to be slaves to an Asian god or some bullshit. It was in everything, even sometimes in just an innocuous way.

Actually, that did kind of happen in the auto industry. Japanese companies opened US factories that operated with extremely low (for the time) wages and extremely micromanaged (for the time) Fordist organization, and absolutely no labor rights, and US companies were forced (although I'm sure upper management didn't need to have their arms twisted) to adopt most of those practices to compete. The beginning of the collapse of Detroit was less about production being shipped overseas and more about production being moved to southern states (like Texas) that had extremely weak legal protection for labor and had already incentivized the auto industry to attract overseas (mostly Japanese) companies to build their factories there.

So yeah, the whole "buy American," "Jap Panic" thing was sold to the general public through xenophobia and racism and isolationism but there also was a real threat to labor and Japanese businesses were a factor. Of course, scapegoating the Japanese also shifted accountability off of the American companies when they fucked their workers over.

Harper's did a great piece about that 4 or 5 years ago, I wish I could remember the issue or author.