Lazlow Jones Reveals the Phone Call That Left Him Both ‘Excited and Scared to Death’ While Working on Grand Theft Auto at Rockstar [IGN]

Lazlow Jones, the host of the Chatterbox FM radio station in 2001’s seminal Grand Theft Auto 3, has many stories to tell about his 19-year stretch at Rockstar. But this one is right up there with the very best.

Speaking to IGN as part of an interview discussing new development studio Absurd Ventures, which he co-founded with fellow Rockstar legend Dan Houser in 2020, Jones recalled the “weird moment” when one GTA fan took the blockbuster video game a little too seriously.

GTA fans will know the Epsilon Program well. It’s a religious cult whose followers are known as Epsilonists. In trademark Rockstar fashion, Houser and Jones designed the Epsilon Program to satirize the likes of Scientology, complete with a modern day messiah fronting a behind-the-scenes pyramid scheme.

Rockstar created a fake Epsilon Program website to market San Andreas back in 2004, and it was in that game that the virtual religion made its debut as a cult founded by a con-man called Cris Formage. Lazlow Jones even interviews him on his in-game radio show.

Rockstar went on to add more and more to the Epsilon Program over the years, fleshing it out with the release of each GTA game. The Epsilon Program always was an on the nose satire, and, for most people, a clear parody. But not for everyone.

During the development of GTA 5, Jones received a disturbing phone call from a ‘fan.’ They had left a message on his work phone. Taking the call, Jones heard a woman introduce herself as representing the followers of the Epsilon Program. These were GTA players who had gone through all the games in the series looking for morsels of new information on the religion, and had formed a real-life group.

“We’re dying to know more,” she said.

Was this person just an over-enthusiastic fan who wanted to know more about the Epsilon Program as part of a cool community Easter egg hunt? Apparently not.

“She was essentially saying that they were worshipers of this fake religion that we had come up with,” Lazlow Jones told IGN.

Jones headed straight into Dan Houser’s office in Rockstar’s New York headquarters to tell him about “this crazy voicemail I got.”

“My second thought was, we should actually just come up with a fake religion and get really, really rich on the backs of people searching for meaning in life!” he joked.

Jones and Houser weren’t put off by the mystery caller, though. They doubled down on the Epsilon Program for GTA 5, creating various missions and cutscenes that revolved around the fake religion. They even wrote a bible called the Epsilon Tract and split it up into pieces that were scattered across the game world for players to find.

It’s hard to believe that GTA’s Epsilon Program actually fooled someone in real-life into thinking it was a real religion. Perhaps Jones got the wrong end of the stick from the phone call? Not so, he insisted.

“She genuinely sounded like she was a follower of the Epsilon Program,” he said. “It’s crazy when you make a satire of something… because we were very straightforward about it. We created a website for the Epsilon Program back in 2004, and all the copy on that, it’s in my mind very clear that it’s a money-grab, modern day fictional religion. But they sounded like proper followers of it. It excited me and scared me to death simultaneously.”

In disbelief at what Lazlow Jones had told me, I had a hunt around online to see if this was an isolated incident, or whether there was evidence that others believed GTA’s fake religion to be real. There are a few joke posts here and there from people pretending to be an Epsilonist, but there is little to suggest a widespread movement, at least in 2024.

Still, according to Lazlow Jones, real-life believers did once exist, and somehow managed to find his work phone number.

Check out IGN’s interview in full with Lazlow Jones, where he talks about audio series A Better Paradise and his new company, Absurd Ventures.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.