GTA dev reveals shocking call from actual “worshipers” of in-game cult

A veteran GTA developer revealed he once received a voicemail from a fan who admitted to having a real-life following of the franchise’s in-game cult.

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for pushing the boundaries between real-life politics and societal issues by weaving it into the games with a satirical twist.

With the release of GTA 6 still on the horizon, the anticipation is palpable. The announcement trailer for the upcoming title has already revealed how the franchise will continue its trend of emulating viral real-life moments and pop culture trends, further fueling the excitement.

While the franchise often draws inspiration from real life to poke fun, a developer on GTA 5 revealed in a new interview that some fans took the project’s in-game cult more seriously than they expected.

The Epsilon Program was first introduced to the franchise in GTA San Andreas and has since become a staple of the series. When advertising San Andreas, Rockstar even created a fake website for the cult to market it’s release in 2004.

During an interview with IGN, Lazlow Jones, a developer who worked at Rockstar Games for almost two decades, revealed that he was once called up by “worshippers” of the fake cult that exists in the GTA franchise.

When working on the development of GTA 5, Jones received a voicemail on his work phone from a woman who referred to herself as a representative for the followers of the Epsilon Program.

The woman then added in the voicemail that she and the rest of the Epsilon Program followers were “dying to know more” about the cult created for the franchise.

“She was essentially saying that they were worshipers of this fake religion that we had come up with,” Jones began. 

“My second thought was, we should actually just come up with a fake religion and get really, really rich on the backs of people searching for meaning in life!” he joked.

Jones then explained that receiving the phone call was a “crazy” experience and that realizing the cult had “proper followers of it” made him both “excited” and “scared to death.”

“She genuinely sounded like she was a follower of the Epsilon Program,” he said. “It’s crazy when you make a satire of something because we were very straightforward about it. We created a website for the Epsilon Program back in 2004, and all the copy on that, it’s in my mind very clear that it’s a money-grab, modern-day fictional religion.”