Elijah is a freelance news writer at gamexplore. He was an associate editor at The A.V. Club and Paste, and has been featured in outlets like Game Informer, Fanbyte, Unwinnable, and more. He loves media in all forms, from fighting games and horror flicks to slow cinema and visual novels. He’s from the Greater Boston area.
Move over Grand Theft Auto 6
Grand Theft Auto 6 will almost certainly be a huge deal. It’s poised to become the biggest game launch of all time, with virtually every rival publisher avoiding its Nov. 19 release date at all costs. However, while plenty of players are obviously excited about this new GTA’s cutting-edge visuals and physics, it seems that there are still old heads eager to play something inspired by the series’ PS2-era shenanigans.
Enter Alaturka, a chaotic open-world title made on a “$0 budget” that went viral over the weekend after its trailer blew up on X. The gameplay video is chaotic, over-the-top, and very Turkish; it looks like a blast.
What is Alaturka about?
As Bufuak, the solo developer behind the project, put it, Alaturka “is basically a PS2-era 70s Istanbul GTA with heavy driving physics and döner kebab deliveries.” The protagonist is a kebab apprentice who arrives in Bosforus, Turkey to work for their uncle. While driving for their day job, they meet less-than-upstanding members of the community who offer higher-paying but far more dangerous jobs involving shootouts and risky getaways. The chaotic sequences shown in the trailer unmistakably resemble GTA games like Vice City and San Andreas.
The Steam page promises heavy car physics that convey the weight of bulky period vehicles. There seems to be a Crazy Taxi-esque delivery system where you have to drop off kebabs while attempting to avoid too many car crashes. When it comes to the gunplay, the game looks modernized compared to old-school GTA, with free aiming instead of the lock-on approach pioneered by GTA 3.
Bufuak wrote on X that he’s spent all his free time over the last two years building Alaturka while livestreaming the its development on his YouTube page. One of the game’s most interesting elements is that it’s “a community project” where “feedback from weekly streams shapes the city.” As for Bufuak’s day job, he’s the Unreal Istanbul community lead. While Alaturka doesn’t have a release window yet, this is a rare case where you can check the game’s progress for yourself in real time.
