Kids Are Creating Gangs Of Aliens In ‘Grand Theft Auto Online’—And Transforming TikTok At The Same Time

During the past week, gang warfare has spread widely throughout the already violent streets of Los Santos, the fictional setting of Grand Theft Auto Online. It has drawn in a mob of players—many them kids and teenagers—who have formed two main groups, the Green Alien and Purple Alien gangs. 

It’s been great for GTA Online, the latest iteration of the 23-year-old brand from Rockstar Games—and even better for TikTok, the ascendant social media app on which the Aliens have chronicled their exploits. In fact, #greenvspurple has become one of the fastest-growing hashtags ever on TikTok, and it represents a significant shift in TikTok culture, the first time that gaming content has taken off on the app.

“These kids are really into it. It’s kind of crazy,” says Zhi Ko, 30, a cryptocurrency day trader who is trying to establish himself as a gaming influencer under the handle @nekoztek. He isn’t an Alien but has emerged as a color commentator of the whole thing, posting recaps of Alien gameplay for his 173,900 followers. “They come online and immediately their persona changes from Johnny, who’s a good 12-year-old kid, to Zito, who’s murdered 50 Aliens and is bloodthirsty.”

The idea to create the gangs began last Wednesday on a subreddit community devoted to GTA Online, and the Aliens began amassing on the game that day. By Thursday, TikToks tagged with #greenvspurple had 20 million views on the app as the gangs posted videos of their killings, beat downs and petty theft set to hip-hop songs. By Friday, that number reached 50 million views. A day later, it had grown to 542 million. In the week since, #greenvspurple has spawned 1.6 billion views. TikTok itself helped #greenvspurple take off, promoting the trend on the top portion of its Discovery feed, a section of the app that the company curates.

The Alien videos are likely at the forefront of a big business opportunity for TikTok. Even before this, TikTok, which has over 30 million active monthly users and had more than 315 million downloads in the first three months of 2020, had established itself as an up-and-coming rival to YouTube. Now, TikTok’s seeming desire to build a gamer audience would further eat away at YouTube: Gamers are a core demographic for YouTube, and one it is keen to keep. YouTube users watch more than 50 billion hours of gaming content a year, and half of the top-earning YouTube stars made their money through gaming videos, including ones of GTA Online. Going a step further, TikTok does also have a live-video function, so it could also go up against Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform that is dominated by gamers and generates more than 10 billion hours of streams a year.

“I haven't seen something like [the Aliens] spill over into non-gaming worlds. And that's what TikTok was clearly perpetuating,” says Matt Klein, who studies digital culture for Sparks and Honey, a marketing consultancy, and is also a Forbes.com contributor. “Which begs the question, Well, why are they allowing that to happen in the first place? What is their intrinsic motivation to allow that spillover into a world that they don't play in in the first place?” TikTok generally uses the top of the Discovery feed to plug content sponsored by advertisers, and while it sometimes gives big trends a spot in Discovery, many of the most popular trends never end up there. TikTok, which wouldn’t return a request to comment for this story, clearly thought #greenvspurple was important enough to promote in that highly visible way. 

How do you join up with the Aliens? Unlike joining a real-life gang, it’s pretty easy. GTA Online players can acquire different outfits, or skins, for their characters directly in the game for free—including a fluorescent, skin-tight bodysuit in either green or purple. Wanna be a Green Alien? Choose the green bodysuit, dress your character in it, then go find other players who’ve done the same. Voila, you’ve joined the gang. And it works vice versa with the Purple Aliens.

There is no supreme leader for either Alien group. Instead, they are more like a collection of scattered clans. There are more than two dozen TikTok accounts devoted to the Purple Aliens and a similar number for the Green Aliens. There are nearly as many Instagram accounts devoted to the Aliens, too, though none have gotten close to the size of the big TikTok accounts.

For the Purple Aliens, the largest TikTok account is @thegtapurps, which has 119,300 followers and was started by four London teenagers. “Previously TikTok has just been adapted towards different dances,” says Finlay Waters, a 16-year-old high school junior who started the account with three school friends. “Now there’s a breakthrough, and gamers get their own chance to mark their ground and flaunt through a TikTok video.” Finlay and crew have also launched a Discord server that has over 500 members, where they and other Purple Aliens plan meet-ups in the game, trade memes and trash talk each other, as well as the Green Aliens.

@thegtapurps has published nine TikToks, averaging 791,000 views each. “We try to either think of new and original video ideas that no one has done before or adapt and improve on ones we have seen already on TikTok,” says Finlay. His group’s first TikTok showed four Purple Aliens taking down another player in the game—a handgun-wielding civilian, not a Green Alien—to the highly aggressive lyrics of “Billy” by Tekashi69. (They could not have chosen a more appropriate ballad or spirit animal than Tekashi69: The rapper and Instagram celebrity ended up doing a stint in prison after trying to legitimize his own faux-gangster persona by joining an actual gang.)

Other @thegtapurps videos show them storming a Green Alien’s yacht and staging a funeral service for a fallen Purple Alien. As with their first TikTok, all these videos are overlaid with pop and hip-hop songs. This is done quite purposefully. “Songs which have gang themes…often help boost the engagement, so it definitely plays a big role in how viral this trend has become,” says Finlay.

Elsewhere in this newly formed world are TikTok accounts that act as news sources, like journalists covering actual gangs and crime. One of the most popular of these accounts, @gta.alien.army, has amassed 89,600 followers and releases frequent TikToks showing maps of the GTA Online world; the maps detail the territories controlled by each of the Alien groups. This is also where people like Zhi Ko come in. He has recently spotlighted several new rivals to the Aliens, including the Monkeys, the Hazmat Suits and the Cyclopses, who all dress exactly as their names suggest.

“It’s a way of life for these kids,” he says. “It's to the point where you're literally hearing these 10-year-old kids use racial slurs inside the game like they’re the most gangster things in the world.”