PSA: Rockstar Games fan-favorite Bully available Aug. 20 on GTA+
You may have forgotten, back in April, Rockstar Games said its 2006 zany coming-of-age adventure Bully would be gracing its GTA+ subscription service this year. Well, its time has come, and here’s a friendly reminder that time is tomorrow.
Rockstar actually announced the release date at the beginning of the month but there’s a chance you missed that, as it was buried under a mile of copy about the latest content coming to Grand Theft Auto Online (the basis for the GTA+ subscription, which launched in March 2022).
Bully will be available through the console marketplace where GTA+ subscribers have an active subscription, as well as in a mobile format on the iOS App Store and Google Play store. It’s unclear whether this is a client native to the PS4/PS5 and Xbox One/Series X or if it’s an emulated version.
An Xbox 360 version of Scholarship Edition has been available on the Microsoft Store since January 2010. It was made backward compatible to Xbox One (and therefore Xbox Series X) in December 2016. An emulated version of the original game for PlayStation 2 is available for PS4 from the PlayStation Store.
GTA Plus launched at the end of March 2022. It confers in-game benefits to players of Grand Theft Auto Online for a $7.99 monthly fee.
It also makes available a rotating library of older Rockstar Games hits, currently L.A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, all available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars are also available to subscribers through the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.
Are you really the bully in Rockstar’s Bully?
Bully debuted in 2006 for PlayStation 2. The moral panic in the media that quickly followed, both for its name and for Rockstar Games’ reputation for making edgy, super-mature content, led to it being renamed “Canis Canem Edit” in the UK, most of Europe, and Australia.
In any case, the name “Bully” might have been a misnomer because antihero protagonist Jimmy Hopkins gets far more than he gives, and violence, such as it is there, is prank-related or schoolyard fisticuffs. It’s a classic teenage exploitation movie about a problem kid getting dumped off at a boarding school by his new stepfather and hateful, gold-digging, absentee mother.
Bully, the “Scholarship Edition” notwithstanding, only saw one release, unusual for any new IP and particularly one borrowing Rockstar’s open-world GTA-style format. Nonetheless, fans have carried a torch for it like few other games, holding out hope that a sequel might one day come.
The odds of that are scant approaching zero. Since the launch of GTA 5 in 2013, Rockstar’s major works have hewn to live service models, making parent company Take-Two Interactive billions in the process.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected sometime in the latter half of 2025.
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