Retro|Spective 102R: Grand Theft Auto

[Asura]

Game 04 - Grand Theft Auto 2
Switching to a slightly futuristic setting within Anywhere City, the game also used live action sequences and a gang loyalty system making it a fair departure from the original game even if the core gameplay remained the same. The game only drew a mixed response in reviews but sold well enough to allow for a third entry...
GTA 2 Many?

I only have two things to say about gta2.

Firstly, that the re-release of the game was reworked to drop the "GTa2" label and changed the cover to this, in order to try and borrow some success off the first one, after consumers were evidently confused by the change in branding:



Second, I worked in videogame retail around this time, and when GTA3 came out (to very little fanfare; GTA3 was something of a snowball, gathering pace over multiple weeks until it was selling out everywhere) there were many customers who, upon seeing it, asked "Wait, 3? Was there a GTA2?" and in some cases "Was Driver GTA2?"

The second game wasn't a financial flop, but it stands between two titans.

[wakka]

Ha, I did not know that about the rebranding! I've never seen the version with the reused artwork from the first game.

[Hirst]

GTA2 is actually really good, gameplay wise. It fixes pretty much every problem with the game engine of the first and revolves around a three gang system where hurting one gang will decrease your standing with them (and make them more violent towards you), but makes rival gangs offer you better missions and what-not. It feels less clunky and you can do things like jump and the gun fights aren't so useless this time round. It's the last GTA game where you had real freedom to more-or-less do what you like to finish it.

The near-future setting is a bit weird and I've never quite gelled with that, but it's a great game regardless and completely underrated in my opinion. It really needs to be played on PC though - the game was designed to be set at night and the PS1 couldn't handle it so they just put it in the "day" mode all the time which ruins the effect really. Also has a really decent made-up soundtrack.

It seems to be the most underrated mainline title, but it also curiously seems to have the strongest cult following of fans. Mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia for some reason.

[Neon Ignition]

It's my least played entry, I think I tried it twice and really disliked it both times. I couldn't really give you a clear reason why but even looking at it now it's just a very off putting looking game and was undoubtedly one of the key reasons why I had absolutely zero expectations or anticipation for a third game

[Neon Ignition]

Game 05 - Grand Theft Auto III
No dancing around it, the entry that shook the industry. A move largely as simple as shifting the gameplay from 2D to 3D, this effort began life following the release of GTA2 and was greenlit after its greatness was set into its core by having its original prototype developed on the Sega Dreamcast. They then developed it out and pitched it to Microsoft as an exclusive, MS rejecting the game due to the prior games sales and the adult nature of the content. The game would roll out on PlayStation 2 instead and the rest is industry history.







What is your legacy with GTA3?

[Asura]

Game 05 - Grand Theft Auto III
What is your legacy with GTA3?

So as-said-before, I worked in games retail at this point and GTAIII was an unusual release.

The PS2 was still relatively young, only about a year old, and people may have forgotten, but like many consoles, it had a turbulent first year. The launch titles were a mixture of good to terrible, and even some of those good titles like Ridge Racer V were marred by bad PAL conversions, something that Dreamcast owners didn't hesitate to point out.

The main problem the PS2 had was that there were few games which really pushed the envelope or did things that weren't previously possible, and owners were hungry for titles like that. The big hitters like Devil May Cry were still a ways off, and the problem with something like Tekken Tag Tournament is that beneath the great-looking veneer, the game is practically Tekken 3, having started life as an arcade game that was literally an "expansion pack" for Tekken 3.

When Grand Theft Auto III came out, there was surprisingly little fanfare. I recall we got about ~10 copies in-store, and two were pre-orders. The rest sat on the shelf, unbought, for a few days, and were gradually snapped up as the week went on.

The following week, we got another 10 on the Thursday, and they sold out before the end of the Saturday.

Quickly we got 30. They sold out within two days.

So we got 60. They sold out before the day was up.

Then we got 120, and they were gone in an hour.

Same the next delivery.

Same the next delivery.

And so on.

We just couldn't sell enough of the thing. The numbers eventually calmed down, but we were getting a dozen in weekly and always selling them within a few days for literally months. It was nearly a year before we had a copy in the store for over a week. We got poster world maps, PrimaGuides and other merchandise in, and that would go too.

The split was 50/50 also between adults buying the game, and parents buying it for their 12 year-old (we had instructions to only consider the age of the person handing over the cash).

To be clear, this was not normal, even for big games of the era. Comparing it to Final Fantasy X, or Metal Gear Solid 2, or Gran Turismo A-Spec; the normal pattern was to sell a load of copies in week 1, then a quarter as much in week two, and by week three you'd be down to ~6 copies a week that would trend to zero over a couple of months. They had a "short tail", which was the norm.

GTAIII had a long tail. Very few games of that era managed to do this (the only other one I can remember is The Sims).

It's the very definition of a grassroots success. It came from nowhere.

[Neon Ignition]

That's one of the irritating things when reading up on it today. It's recorded as having been received to universal acclaim but that very much wasn't the case.

I'd completely given up on GTA as a franchise and occasionally I'd see pieces on GTA3 but they never made any impression, even in screens the game wasn't a looker even back in its day. It only really came up on my radar in the week or two leading up to its release and I still didn't really have any interest in picking it up but faced with having finished what I was playing I made a last minute choice that it was at least something to spend the weekend on and traded in to get it.

I'd already read reviews too, they weren't bad but they absolutely didn't praise it. Once it became clear that the game was the lightning bolt that it was many revised their reviews or re-reviewed it to cover their backsides and suddenly all those 6's and 7's shot up to 9 and 10's. That alone was a very eye opening lesson to learn about reviews.

But for the game itself, it was about 8pm before I put it on and I started doing the first few missions. I think that once you get a few missions deep into the first island's missions I'd died once or twice with the on foot bits and on each retry would try a different approach. That freedom on how to complete a mission is something the games would lose quickly but at the time it was central to the impression GTA3 left and about an hour in I still recall consciously thinking to myself that this wasn't just another game.

It was utterly fascinating to play and addictive as hell, I don't think I stopped till about 1am in the morning and when you spend time away from a game thinking about it all the time you know you're playing one of 'those' landmark games. By the time I finished it I went through it again, then again before stopping. Twice more I think before the gen was over, again on the Xbox version which is a lot when you factor in that just that generation would deliver a lot more GTA.

An absolutely astounding game

[wakka]

A mind boggling experience on release, and still a great game to this day. The two gentleman above have both captured experiences from the time, so I'll add my impressions from today.

I played this through again last year via re3, which is a full rebuild of the PC version of the game, enabling you to play it in 4K/60 widescreen. I went into it with curiosity - to be honest I expected to find it slightly dull. It's the template, after all, for so much of what mainstream gaming now consists of, that I imagined it might feel a hollow experience today.

But, nope, actually it's a huge amount of fun. The fact is, the creativity and ambition of its open world aside, the game is simply very well executed. The maps, crucially, are well designed, and fun to move through. The roads are the right width. The traffic is the right density. The cars move in an enjoyable manner. They nailed these critical gameplay components that define so much of the experience.

It's not all good, obviously - aiming a gun is a complete jank-fest, giving us the double-tap-to-aim mechanism that for some godforsaken reason Rockstar have been using as recently as RDR2 - but the game is basically fun to navigate and explore.

The missions are short, sharp, and provide just enough variety. The cutscenes are entertaining. And the talk radio and music provide a memorable, atmospheric backdrop.

I could bleat on for ages, but it's just a really ****ing good game, basically. Great fun to play today, and a seminal title in the history of videogames.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Gta2: I owned it. Not much to say. It's better than the previous 2 and felt much more solid to play.

GTA3: Yep, it was a sleeper that quickly grew attention. The move to 3d just blew everyone's minds. It was the first game that offered an open world playground for you to just go wild. I played this relentlessly.
Unfortunately, I was unemployed, suicidal and in a dark place when I played this. So it doesn't bring back the happy memories that it should.

[Hirst]

GTA3 is a great game, though it’s held together with brown tape and hope (which adds some charm I guess). I was initially really suspicious of it as it looked horrible in the preview shots off the beta. Look them up, they’re awful. I think at that time they hadn’t done the lighting engine properly, everything looked really cartoony and weird – like a dodgy third-party N64 game, a bad mixture of shaded bright colours and photo textures.

By the time it came out, it was a lot more moody looking and had lots of effects like lighting trails and fog, which (mostly) concealed the dodgy looks. This completely changed the aesthetic of the game for the better, making the city feel a bit grim, almost as bad as Morley. But as a die-hard fan of the old top-down games, I still wasn’t sold on it, even with a mate telling me it was great. It took him the effort of recording a load of gameplay footage on a VHS tape (which I’ve still got), showing all the weird stuff you can do. After that? Well, I still think it’s a weird-looking game, but it plays so good. Except the aiming, which is pretty awful.

One of the key things with 3 is that more than any other entry, you can do most missions however you like. The silent protagonist meant that missions weren’t forced to be linear in order to tie up with dialogue, which I will maintain is the undoing of the series – it’s insane to give you an open world sandbox and then constantly have your hands tied in missions. Most of the missions in 3 were relatively simple, but could be solved creatively. If I died in a mission, I’d be thinking “wonder if I could go up there beforehand and throw grenades down” or “what would happen if I took that car mid-mission and put a bomb on it before he gets in”. I remember solving a mission I was having trouble with by using a lorry as a makeshift platform and using the last few shots I had from a sniper rifle I’d been given in a previous mission.

The soundtrack was pretty good in this one too, a mixture of their own tracks and licensed (but relatively obscure) music. And I still find the Chatterbox station funny even though I’ve heard it hundreds of times by now. Freddy needs a nanny. Citizens Raging Against Phones. Fernando. KILLER BEES.

[Asura]

I forgot to say, also, the last bit of where I was driving with that prior post.

GTAIII satisfied that desire to have something on PS2 that simply couldn't have been done before. The Dreamcast could probably have had a good go (Crazy Taxi and Headhunter suggest that), but I just mean something for this hardware generation that we hadn't seen before, comparable to something like Phantasy Star Online in terms of how it broke ground.

And the fun part of GTAIII is that it only came a year or so after Driver 2, which illustrates precisely why it was such a leap, because while Driver 2 was fun, it shows that ultimately, that kind of game couldn't be done on PS1 for numerous reasons. You just couldn't do open worlds of that sort of scale and scope on PS1.

The prior games to demo something like this were Shenmue and Omikron: The Nomad Soul. However, these games were polar opposites (despite sharing a lot their concepts). Shenmue's areas were hyper-detailed and filled with all sorts of neat touches, but being so hand-crafted in feel, they were small and felt quite "closed off" despite technically being "open-world". Omikron had the opposite problem; it had big city locations like GTA, with pedestrians on the streets, but the detail was very sparse, and even the pedestrians were non-interactive.

So I guess what I'm saying is that GTAIII wasn't entirely without precedent, but when it came out, you kinda realised that this was the game that all of those other titles had been leading to. An "open world" set in a believable location, packed with stuff to do and see, with few limits as to what you could do or where you could go. It kinda just made sense, which is the perfect sign that something is about to catch the zeitgeist - when you see it, you realise it's what you want, before you even asked for it.

In effect, that made it the perfect game for the PS2 to have as it hurtled towards its second Christmas on the market. Anyone was gonna have a happy Christmas with that and Devil May Cry under the tree

[wakka]

It kinda just made sense, which is the perfect sign that something is about to catch the zeitgeist - when you see it, you realise it's what you want, before you even asked for it.

Spot on. Like all the best ideas, GTA III's concept and design seem, in hindsight, totally obvious. Yet before someone does them, these things never actually are. It's a tremendous work.

[Hirst]

I don't know who needs to know this, but the textures for the wheels were taken directly off real cars. The alloy wheels used on things like the Sentinel are from a first-generation Honda HR-V (you can even see the H logo) and the hubcaps used on things like the Taxi/Police are from a second-generation Fiat Punto. That's what you get for having somebody on the forum who is both a game and car dullard.

[Cassius_Smoke]

I like it. We should have a thread for Useless but interesting gaming facts.

[Asura]

I don't know who needs to know this, but the textures for the wheels were taken directly off real cars. The alloy wheels used on things like the Sentinel are from a first-generation Honda HR-V (you can even see the H logo) and the hubcaps used on things like the Taxi/Police are from a second-generation Fiat Punto. That's what you get for having somebody on the forum who is both a game and car dullard.

Truthfully, a fun (IT IS FUN SHUT UP) thing to do that's similar to this is to trawl https://www.textures.com/ - which used to be called CGTextures. It's a repository of images like this, and has been around since ~2002.

These days it's not quite as potent as it's absolutely huge; but back in ~2010, the range of images was smaller, and if you had a subscription and used it regularly, you would notice these textures in practically every game you played. Like you'd see a mesh window in Assassin's Creed and just think "yeah, that's from man-made>architecture>arabic>windows").