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PC Gamer Is Turning GTA 5 Into Crazy Taxi While the World Waits for GTA 6 — and the City Is Fighting Back

We are 58 days from GTA 6 launching on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the wait has officially driven at least one person insane in the most entertaining way possible. PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens is modding GTA 5 every single day in a stated quest to “either transform it into a PC version of GTA 6 or break it entirely.” He has already stripped the friction out of every car in Los Santos and rebuilt the game as a street golf sim. This week, the series reached its natural destination: he installed a Crazy Taxi mod, and Los Santos declared war on his fares.

As PC Gamer documents in the latest installment of the experiment, the aptly-named Crazy Taxi Mod floods the city with yellow pickup circles. Approach one, hit H, and you’re dumped into classic Crazy Taxi rules: a ticking timer, sidewalk passengers, and one goal — chain pickups and drop-offs fast enough that your time limit grows instead of shrinks. It is, on paper, a perfect fit. GTA has shipped taxi side missions since the original Vice City. But on paper is not where Wolens’ save file lives anymore.

What Happened

The premise of the series is cumulative chaos: every mod stacks on top of the last one’s wreckage. Earlier entries removed car friction entirely — meaning every vehicle in Los Santos now slides away at the slightest touch — and armed the streets to the teeth. The Crazy Taxi chapter inherits all of it, and the results are catastrophic in the best way.

First, the car selection screen: the mod offers a lineup of yellow cabs to choose from, but thanks to the no-friction rule, they “immediately jet off the vehicle-select screen as soon as they appear.” Pick fast, because the game teleports you into whichever cab you chose, wherever it currently is — and if you hesitate, your preferred taxi has “either taken flight or ploughed into the side of a building and exploded.”

Then, the fares. The streets are, in Wolens’ telling, in a state of “rolling gang war” thanks to his previous mods. Passengers get scared off by gunfire before they reach the cab, get hit by cars, or get shot by his own bodyguards. “Or they have bad credit maybe,” he offers. “Who knows? Point is, they sometimes fail to actually get in the car, leaving me idling my big yellow taxi forlornly at the side of the road, eternally.”

There’s history under the joke, too. Taxi work has been a GTA tradition since the top-down originals, but the 2002 Vice City put it front and center — you could buy Kaufman Cabs as an asset and grind fares across the city, a thinly affectionate nod to Sega’s arcade classic. Twenty-four years later, the loop has closed: a writer is splicing the actual Crazy Taxi formula back into GTA, in the same franchise that borrowed it, while waiting for the game that returns us to the same city. Pop culture eats itself; GTA just does it with better explosions.

The Context: One Journalist vs. 58 Days of Waiting

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been following the descent. When the series turned GTA 5 into a street golf sim, it read as a clever gag about the long wait for a PC port that Rockstar still hasn’t announced. (Take-Two’s boss, for what it’s worth, keeps saying PC is “more and more important” — the politest possible “ask again later.”) With Crazy Taxi, the series has become something stranger and funnier: a man breaking a game in daily increments, on a deadline that ends when GTA 6 finally ships and the joke is no longer necessary.

There’s also a wink of pop-culture timing. Crazy Taxi is genuinely back in the conversation — Sega is reviving the franchise as a game and even a movie. Wolens’ take: “What you have not heard is that I, personally, am bringing Crazy Taxi back. I am bringing it back to Los Santos.” The mod itself is the work of the GTA 5 modding community, the same ecosystem Rockstar just addressed with its new mod guidelines — rules we broke down here, and which read, in part, like a preview of how modding will work on GTA 6’s eventual PC version.

That’s the layer that makes this more than a throwaway bit. Rockstar’s guidelines restrict third-party IP and story-altering mods, which puts lovingly janky homages like a Crazy Taxi conversion in interesting territory. For now, single-player chaos experiments remain the modding scene’s lifeblood — and its most public ambassador is a journalist systematically dismantling a ten-year-old game because the sequel isn’t here yet.

Wolens’ sign-off captures the mood of the entire wait — idling at the curb, fare never arriving, watching a city tear itself apart in the rearview mirror. “But aren’t we all doing that in some way, when you think about it?” he writes. No notes. That is simply what August-through-November 2026 feels like.

What This Means for GTA 6

Nothing — and that’s the point. This is the filler the internet produces when the biggest game on Earth is this close and this sealed. No new trailer has dropped, Rockstar is saying almost nothing, and so the discourse runs on fumes: leaked maps, file-size panic, marketing stunts in real Miami, and one man’s daily sabotage of Los Santos. It’s a preview of what the next eight weeks look like — the community entertaining itself while the clock runs down.

There’s a GTA 6 angle worth stealing, though. Wolens’ experiment keeps proving how much raw comedy lives in GTA 5’s systems the moment you bend one rule — no friction, and the whole city becomes a slapstick machine. GTA 6’s trailers promise a denser, more reactive Vice City, and if Rockstar’s simulation is even half as breakable, the “we modded it until it exploded” genre is about to have a rich new canvas on day one.

And if watching someone else break Los Santos just makes the wait worse, we keep a running list of things to do while waiting for GTA 6 — several of which involve GTA 5, and none of which require installing a gang war.

The Bottom Line

With 58 days to go, the GTA 6 discourse has fully entered its cabin-fever era, and PC Gamer’s slow-motion demolition of GTA 5 is its purest expression: a daily countdown performed in explosions, flying taco trucks, and fares who never make it into the cab. It is dumb, joyful, and weirdly honest about what we’re all doing — making our own fun until Rockstar takes over. The experiment ends when GTA 6 arrives on November 19. Between now and then, Los Santos’ suffering is our entertainment.

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Related reading: PC Gamer modded GTA 5 into a golf sim · Rockstar’s new mod guidelines, explained · Things to do while waiting for GTA 6