What Exactly Happens in Dunkey's 'GTA Who?' Video — and Why Is Everyone Talking About It?

Videogamedunkey, one of YouTube's most influential gaming voices, dropped a new video on September 1, 2026 titled 'GTA Who?' — and the gaming internet has not stopped talking about it since. The video centers on Saints Row 2, Volition's 2008 open-world crime sandbox that many fans consider a forgotten masterpiece buried under the long shadow of the GTA franchise.

The title alone is a provocation. With GTA VI existing somewhere in the cultural atmosphere as gaming's most anticipated release, Dunkey's framing — 'GTA Who?' — is a direct challenge to the assumption that Rockstar's franchise has always been the gold standard. His verdict, delivered in his signature chaotic commentary style: 'This game is 2 good.'

The video showcases Saints Row 2's most absurd and inventive mechanics — mid-flight plane handstands, explosive oxygen tanks strapped to elderly NPCs, drinking and driving via an in-car inventory system, and a cop-car sporting the number 67 on the roof. Dunkey leans hard into the game's gleeful lawlessness, the kind of anarchic sandbox design that modern open-world games have largely abandoned in favor of cinematic realism.

What Made Saints Row 2 So Special — and Does It Still Hold Up in 2026?

Released in October 2008 — the same month as GTA IV — Saints Row 2 was immediately overshadowed despite offering things its more prestigious competitor simply did not. No planes in GTA IV. Saints Row 2 had planes. And handstands on them.

The game's open-world city, Stilwater, is now being re-evaluated by a new wave of viewers discovering it through Dunkey's lens. Its neighborhoods are genuinely varied, its enterable buildings are plentiful, and its tone sits in a sweet spot between absurdist comedy and grounded street-level crime drama that neither its own sequels nor any GTA title has replicated.

Key features fans are re-celebrating right now:

• Vehicle surfing in co-op, which commenters argue made it more fun than any GTA multiplayer experience
• In-car inventory system allowing drinking and driving, a mechanic developers have never dared revisit
• Explosive NPC props hidden throughout the world for emergent comedy moments
• A dense, walkable city with a neighborhood variety that modern open-world titles often sacrifice for scale

The PC port, notoriously broken at launch, has been kept alive for years by a passionate modding community — most notably the late modder Idolninja, who worked tirelessly to patch bugs, restore cut content, and port console DLC before his passing. The comments section of Dunkey's video became a spontaneous tribute to his legacy.

What Are Fans Actually Saying in the Comments?

The reaction to 'GTA Who?' is overwhelmingly nostalgic, passionate, and occasionally heartbroken — a combination that rarely hits this hard in a YouTube comment section.

"SR2 is still my favourite open-world game of all time, and it still has a really active PC modding community... RIP Idolninja, he paved the way for the Saints Row PC community." — @Sharkmonger

"Bro this reminds me of how I played the fuck out of Saints Row 1 while waiting for GTA IV's release, and I had a moment where I was like, 'Y'know what? I don't even need GTA IV.'" — @tekalist

"It's actually criminal what happened to this franchise. Take-Two essentially own the open world crime genre... Saints Row could have filled in that huge gap and they blew it." — @thankzcomputerr

"finished watching, dunkey I'm gonna need like 10 more saints row 2 videos from you, you've only scratched the surface." — @HelixSnake

Several commenters noted the video's timing feels deliberate — a warm-up act before an eventual GTA VI video that fans are now anticipating from Dunkey almost as much as the game itself. One commenter, @yisshyo, put it plainly: 'Looks like GTA is getting the Mario Kart treatment where Dunkey runs through the entire library of shovelware knockoffs in the leadup to the game's release.' The comment is pointed, but the affection underneath it is real — nobody actually thinks Saints Row 2 is shovelware.

The grief over Volition's closure in 2023 also surfaced repeatedly. The studio that made Saints Row 2 no longer exists, killed by the commercial failure of the 2022 reboot. Fans know there will be no redemption arc, no remaster from the original team — only the hope that a publisher picks up the license and does something meaningful with it.

Is This the Best Time to Finally Play Saints Row 2?

The short answer: yes, with caveats.

If you are on console, the Xbox 360 backward-compatible version remains the smoothest experience. On PC, the community-built 'Gentlemen of the Row' mod package — Idolninja's crowning achievement — is still the recommended way to play, patching the worst performance issues while restoring content most players never saw.

This is not a perfect game by modern standards. The mission design can be repetitive, the story's tone swings wildly, and the PC port's underlying issues, even modded, still surface occasionally. But as a sandbox? As a place to just exist and cause problems with a friend in co-op? It remains almost entirely unmatched.

Virality Prediction: Expect 'Saints Row 2' to spike on Google Trends and X/Twitter search within the next 48 hours as Dunkey's audience — which skews toward influential gaming voices — clips and reshares the video's best moments. If Dunkey follows this up with a GTA VI-adjacent video in the coming weeks, this Saints Row 2 moment will be cited as the opener to one of the more memorable gaming video arcs of 2026. A definitive edition announcement or remaster reveal would turn this cultural moment into a genuine industry news story — and given the current climate, that possibility is not as remote as it once seemed.