It’s arguable that GTA Online’s Halloween event is proving somewhat popular. The zombie-slaughtering North Yankton Nightmare, added to the game along with GTA V’s opening location, Ludendorff, has been so popular Rockstar had to increase the community challenge goals ten-fold. Three days in, even that goal was over halfway done.
Yesterday, October 13, Rockstar posted to its X account that over 430 million zombies had been dispatched by players since the new mode went live on the 10th. That’s more than halfway to its revised 800 million zombie goal, itself already bumped up from the initial target of 80 million.
Alongside other goals, like surviving the cemetery for three waves of zombies to get a “Creepy Cat Mask” and GTA$100,000, the community challenge has driven astonishing numbers of players back to the already incredibly popular online game.
Eurogamer points toward statistics that showed 400,000 people logged in at the start of the event, causing Rockstar to rapidly revise their targets, realizing that 80 million was going to take no time at all. According to the same stats, that number of unique players now sits at almost 1.3 million, making short work of the enormous 800,000,000 goal.
This was yesterday, so goodness knows where things will sit after the U.S. has enjoyed a three-day weekend. Certainly the challenge will be over in the next couple of days, weeks before Halloween itself, which was surely the timeframe Rockstar would have originally envisaged.
There should probably be a term for the thing where everyone always underestimates the scale of what people on the internet are capable of. Although it does at this point seem implausible that anyone could ever predict the feverish popularity that surrounds anything with “GTA” written on it, even 11 years since the last time there was a new game.
As one person responding to Rockstar suggests, “If we hit 1 billion, we get GTA 6 trailer 2?”
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