Lazlow Jones, the host of Chatterbox FM radio station in GTA 3 and subsequent games, has many stories to tell about his 19 years at Rockstar. This case is one of the best.
In an interview with IGN about the new development studio Absurd Ventures, which he founded with fellow Rockstar employee Dan Houser in 2020, Jones recalled a «weird moment» when a GTA fan took the game too seriously.
GTA fans are well aware of the «Epsilon Program», a fictional religious cult. Hauser and Jones designed it in the Rockstar style to make fun of people like Scientologists and conspiracy theorists. Rockstar created the website «Epsilon Programs» to promote GTA San Andreas back in 2004. It was in this game that the cult founded by fraudster Chris Formage made its debut. Lazlow Jones even interviews him on the in-game radio show. Over the years, Rockstar has added content to the Epsilon Program with the release of each GTA game.
It turns out that not everyone understood the satirical and parody nature of the project. While developing GTA 5, Jones received a disturbing phone call from a «fan». She left a message on his work phone. When he answered the phone, Jones heard a woman introducing herself as a representative of the «Epsilon» followers. These are GTA players who have played through all the games in the series, looking for bits of information about the religion and have created a group in real life.
«We are dying to know more,» the woman said.
Was she just a fan who wanted to learn more as part of a joint Easter egg hunt? Probably not.
«Basically, she was saying that they were adherents of this false religion that we had made up,» Lazlow Jones said.
Jones then headed to Dan Hauser’s office at Rockstar’s New York headquarters to tell him about «this crazy voicemail I got».
«My second thought was that we should just make up a fake religion and become very, very rich on the backs of people looking for meaning in life!» — Jones jokes.
However, the mysterious caller did not excite Jones and Hauser. They doubled down on the content of the «Epsilon Programs» in GTA 5: they created various quests and videos that revolved around the fake religion. They even wrote a religious book «Epsilon Tract» and divided it into parts that were scattered around the game world for players to find.
Jones insists that the woman was not just a fan of the game, but a fan of the religion.
«She really sounded like she was a follower of the Epsilon Program. It’s crazy when you make a satire of something… we were very open about it. We created a website for the Epsilon Program back in 2004, and the concept of it is, in my opinion, quite clear — it’s a modern fictional religion that pulls money. But she spoke as a true follower of it. It excited me and scared me to death at the same time».
IGN’s Wesley Yin-Poole was skeptical of Jones’ words and searched the Internet for traces of fans of the fictional GTA religion. He found a few joking posts from people pretending to be Epsilonists, but little evidence of the cult spreading, at least in 2024.
Source: IGN
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