Gamescom weeks are ridiculous.
You start Monday morning with a reasonably tidy list of things you expect to be writing about and, somewhere around Tuesday evening, Geoff Keighley opens his floodgates, and suddenly there are trailers flying around, games being announced, old games coming back, new hardware appearing from nowhere and somebody, somewhere, inevitably deciding that what we really need is another, hopefully profitable remake.
Then Grand Theft Auto 6 turns up on Netflix and renders most of your carefully constructed plans largely irrelevant anyway.
Rockstar finally gave us the extended look at GTA 6 we have been waiting years for on Thursday night, and suddenly the biggest game on the planet was dominating the conversation all over again.
It makes it very easy for some genuinely interesting stories to disappear underneath the avalanche.
So, rather than simply regurgitating the biggest headlines of the week, we thought we would start picking out some of our favourite things we have covered on The Escapist during the previous few days.
Not necessarily the biggest stories. Not necessarily the ones everybody else wrote about. Just the things we thought were interesting, strange, exciting or completely ridiculous.
And this week has given us plenty to choose from.
GTA 6 finally gave us the proper look we have been waiting forWell, this was always going to win, wasn’t it?
After years of trailers, screenshots, leaks, speculation and people zooming in on individual frames to work out whether a car has realistic suspension, Rockstar finally showed us what playing Grand Theft Auto 6 is actually going to look like.
Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look debuted on Netflix on Thursday before appearing six hours later on YouTube, giving us around 26 minutes of in-game footage captured entirely on PlayStation 5.
And there was a lot in there, albeit at 30fps, like it was the early 2000s
We saw Jason and Lucia fighting their way out of an apartment building after a deal goes bad, the pair robbing stores and diners, shootouts with the police, car chases and a sizeable chunk of everyday life around Vice City.
There was scuba diving, scooters, airboats, racing, parachuting, strip clubs and small-store robberies, while switching between Jason and Lucia appeared considerably faster and smoother than GTA 5’s character swapping. Combat also looked noticeably sharper than before.
Perhaps the most impressive thing, though, was how ordinary parts of it looked.
Jason waiting around while Lucia gets ready to go out. The pair holding hands as they walk into a party. Jason opening the fridge. Dogs wandering around. People doing stupid things on the street.
Rockstar has always been exceptional at creating worlds that continue existing when you aren’t shooting somebody, and GTA 6 looks absolutely stuffed with those tiny details. It reminded me of how I felt when I first saw RDR2.
GTA 6 remains scheduled for November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
We covered the build-up and GTA 6 Extended Look start times here
Commodore built a Cyberpunk 2077 C64 and it is absolutely filthySometimes a press release lands in the inbox and you immediately know exactly what you are going to be doing for the next hour. The Commodore 77 was one such release
The newly revived Commodore has taken its FPGA-powered Commodore 64 Ultimate and collaborated with CD Projekt Red to produce what is effectively a Cyberpunk 2077 computer from an alternative 1980s timeline.
The familiar C64 breadbin has been transformed with an exterior inspired by Cyberpunk’s Seocho Electronics, complete with warning labels, industrial markings and enough yellow detailing to make the machine look like somebody dragged it out of a Night City electronics market.
Underneath all that cyberpunk dressing is still a seriously capable modern C64 recreation, complete with HDMI, USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi alongside cartridge, Datasette, disk-drive and old-school joystick connections.
It is the collision between 1982 and 2077 that makes the whole thing work, though. There is also something beautifully contradictory about Commodore selling an anti-corporate, distraction-free computer through one of the largest videogame licensing collaborations imaginable.
Whatever. Just look at it.
Read our Commodore 77 story
Alien Breed is back, and suddenly it is 1991 againCommodore wasn’t finished with our nostalgia glands either.
Alien Breed is one of those Amiga games that immediately transports anybody of a certain age back to darkened bedrooms, enormous floppy disk boxes and the horrible realization that something unpleasant was waiting around the next corner.
Thirty-five years after the original arrived, Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection is bringing together all six Amiga-era games: Alien Breed, Special Edition 92, Alien Breed II, Tower Assault, Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D II.
Modern controls, save states and couch and online co-op are being added, but importantly the original games themselves are being preserved rather than simply replaced by shiny remakes.
There are some wonderful bits of Alien Breed history wrapped up in the story as well. Those horrifying creature noises? Some of them started life as recordings of newborn kittens before being pitch-shifted and mixed with explosions.
You’re welcome.
The collection arrives September 24 on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, with Nintendo Switch following later in the fall.
Read our Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection story
Atari really was teasing Activision cartridges – and we nailed this one in advanceThere are few things more dangerous in games journalism than confidently predicting what a company is teasing (although let us be the first to say GTA VII will be out in 2039).
Which made it considerably more satisfying when Atari finally revealed its mysterious “vision for your game shelf” and it turned out to be exactly what we thought it was. Activision.
Atari is resurrecting 39 Activision Atari 2600 games as physical cartridges, bringing one of the most important libraries from the early days of console gaming back onto real hardware.
It is a lovely little historical circle as well. Activision was created by former Atari programmers who left the company to establish what became the industry’s first major independent third-party publisher. Almost half a century later, Atari now owns the Intellivision brand and is publishing new Activision cartridges.
Videogame history is weird.
The other reason this was one of our favourites was simply getting to write the follow-up after correctly joining the dots when Atari first started teasing the announcement. We don’t get every prediction right, so allow us this one.
Read how we correctly predicted Atari’s Activision reveal
Geralt has apparently been informed that retirement is cancelledThe Witcher 3 turned 11 this year so, naturally, CD Projekt Red has decided that what an 11-year-old game really needs is a remaster and an entirely new expansion.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered arrives September 29, bringing visual, performance and gameplay improvements to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox, with qualifying existing owners receiving the upgrade for free. Nintendo Switch 2 is getting a native version as well.
More interestingly, Songs of the Past will arrive in 2027 and send Geralt to an entirely new region called Letten.
Poor Geralt is never getting that quiet retirement at Corvo Bianco.
Read about The Witcher 3 Remastered and Songs of the Past
Bodycam showed us something far more interesting than another pretty Unreal Engine 5 gameMonday produced one of our more opinionated stories of the week.
We’ve all seen the Unreal Engine 5 demonstrations by now. Wet pavement. Flickering lights. Incredible reflections. Somebody slowly walking around an abandoned building while YouTube comments argue about whether the footage is real. Bodycam: Locked & Loaded caught our attention for a different reason.
Its latest overhaul isn’t simply chasing photorealism. The work being done on weapon handling, character movement, reload animations and the relationship between the player’s body and camera suggests Reissad Studio is thinking much more deeply about how first-person shooters actually feel.
There are plenty of questions remaining about whether Bodycam itself can fulfil all that potential, but seeing somebody experimenting with fundamentals that FPS games have largely treated the same way for decades is considerably more interesting than another puddle with ray tracing.
We may have got slightly carried away suggesting it could change PC shooters forever.
We stand by it.
Read why Bodycam’s overhaul got us so excited
Somebody has made an 8,000Hz Guitar Hero controller because apparently we needed oneCompetitive plastic guitar technology has clearly been neglected for too long.
CRKD is bringing back the legendary Xbox 360-era Xplorer guitar controller as part of its Stage Tour Pro Guitar Collection, except apparently merely reproducing an old Guitar Hero controller would have been far too sensible.
So this one has an 8,000Hz polling rate. It also gets mechanical fret buttons, direct wiring, a Hall Effect click strum bar and both wired and wireless connectivity.
The 20th Anniversary Explorer will cost £119.99/$129.99 and begins shipping in January 2027, shortly after Stage Tour launches in December.
Will anybody outside the most frighteningly talented rhythm-game players on Earth be able to notice the difference between a normal polling rate and 8,000Hz while hammering their way through a plastic-guitar solo? Almost certainly not.
Do we still quite want one?
Obviously.
Read about the completely unnecessary 8K Guitar Hero controller
And somehow that wasn’t everythingWe haven’t even managed to squeeze in Lofsöng, a beautiful-looking Icelandic adventure that immediately gave us serious Journey vibes, Football Manager 27 restoring some much-loved ideas from older games, Brazil bringing 35 indie games to Gamescom, or Nacon unveiling a surprisingly affordable direct-drive racing wheel.
That’s Gamescom week for you.
We’ll be back with another round-up next weekend to see what gaming manages to throw at us next.
The post Our favourite stories of the week: GTA 6 finally shows its hand, a Cyberpunk C64 and Alien Breed returns appeared first on The Escapist.