Lord Sear, the voice behind Game FM in Grand Theft Auto III, has died at 53 after SiriusXM's Shade 45 confirmed his death. For GTA players, he was one half of the station that gave Liberty City one of its most authentic radio identities, bringing real New York hip hop credibility alongside Stretch Armstrong. No cause of death was announced.
Steve Watson, who was better known as Lord Sear, passed away on March 11, 2026. He was 53. SiriusXM's Shade 45 confirmed the news, though no cause of death was given.
For millions of players, Lord Sear's voice was the sound of driving through Liberty City. In Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001, he co-hosted Game FM alongside DJ Stretch Armstrong, the station dedicated to East Coast underground hip-hop at a time when most of GTA III's other stations leaned into parody or genre pastiche. Game FM didn't feel like a joke. It played Royce da 5'9", Sean Price, and Nature, and the two hosts talked about the music like people who had actually lived inside that scene for years. Because they had.
What made Game FM stand out in GTA III wasn't just the playlist. Rockstar's earlier games had radio stations, but GTA III was the first in the 3D era, and the radio became central to the game's identity in a new way. You were spending real time in cars, and the stations had to hold up. Most of them worked through character, as the pop station, the talk radio station, and the classic rock station all had recognizable archetypes running them. Game FM worked because it had actual people.
Stretch Armstrong was already a legend in New York hip-hop by 2001. Lord Sear had come up alongside him, initially as a tour DJ for rapper Kurious before becoming a fixture on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show on Columbia University's WKCR in the early 1990s. That show was where Jay-Z, Nas, Biggie, and Wu-Tang Clan all appeared before their careers took off. When those two ended up behind the Game FM mic together, they brought that entire history with them, and it came through in how they sounded.
