In an attempt to foster excitement for Stockholm Pride, which at 10 days is the largest LGBT Pride festival in Scandinavia,Grand Theft AutoV modders (a.k.a. gamers who use the open-source platform to create new visuals in the game) have developed Los Santos Pride, a free GTA addition that lets users experience a virtual pride parade.
But in a bizarre promotional interview for the mod, promoter William Lothman told Polygon that the development team would allow users to do everything in this mod that they could do in the standard game—like disrupt or destroy the pride parade and kill its participants.
"This project has never been about moralizing about violence in video games," Lothman told Polygon. "Doing something violent inside it doesn't mean that you stand behind violence or horrific acts."
The Polygon reporter, Owen Good, continued:
Lothman and the team had considered that some users might stage a massacre on the Pride parade in Los Santos and upload videos of that to YouTube or Facebook. They decided to let that kind of hate speech speak for itself[.]
Lothman and co. apparently changed their tune after Florida resident Omar Mateen fatally shot 49 people and injured over 53 at Pulse, the iconic gay nightclub in Orlando, Fl., on June 12. After a regrouping, Good says, the team decided it would continue work on the game, but make the march "indestructible" to show that "love always triumphs."
