As anticipation builds for Grand Theft Auto 6, a look back at the original Grand Theft Auto reveals a game that, despite its considerable age and unforgiving nature, laid the crucial groundwork for the open-world genre. This retrospective eschews traditional scoring, instead focusing on what made the game remarkable at its release and how its core elements have evolved over nearly three decades.
Upon its late 1990s debut, Grand Theft Auto was a revelation, offering a digitized version of childhood car chases with a familiar, intuitive, yet anti-social twist on top-down racing. It was bold, brash, and brutally difficult, a combination that paradoxically compelled players forward. Nearly 30 years later, the original title remains a charmingly silly experience, replete with varied vehicles, hilarious sound effects, and a trendsetting soundtrack, though its unforgiving difficulty persists.
Unlike its modern successors, the original GTA eschews a meaningful narrative in favor of arcade-style progression. The core loop revolves around maximizing scores within limited lives, a stark contrast to the series' later reinventions. The game's visual presentation, featuring 2D sprites for vehicles and pedestrians superimposed on 3D cityscapes, may not have represented the cutting edge of late-90s technology alongside titles like Gran Turismo or Half-Life, but its unprecedented open-world freedom was its true innovation.
This player agency is the game's enduring strength. The three distinct maps—Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas—while small by today's standards, offered a level of sandbox freedom that was groundbreaking. Players could approach objectives clinically or chaotically, navigate the cities as they pleased, take any vehicle, and tackle missions in any order, or ignore them entirely in favor of simply causing mayhem and evading law enforcement. This foundational design philosophy, likely not fully foreseen by developer DMA Design, established the bedrock for all subsequent sandbox action games.
Controls and Navigation Challenges
Grand Theft Auto remains a clunky game to play, a characteristic true even at its original release. Driving controls, while broadly fun for those with prior experience in top-down racers like Codemasters' Micro Machines, can be challenging. The camera's occasional jerkiness and the tendency to bump into other vehicles due to late rendering can be frustrating. Motorbikes are particularly unwieldy, often resulting in more time spent remounting than riding. The directional input for cars, where left always means left regardless of the vehicle's orientation, is intuitive for some but can be a braintwister for newcomers.
The absence of an in-game map was another significant hurdle, necessitating the use of physical paper maps—a novelty for a generation accustomed to digital navigation. These maps are essential for completing time-sensitive missions and serve as a poignant reminder of a bygone era of physical gaming media.
On foot, the game's controls falter considerably. The tank-like movement, a consequence of the era before dual-analog controllers became standard, restricts players to simple directional inputs. Combat is particularly difficult, compounded by the fact that a single hit can be fatal. Body armor offers minimal protection, and lining up shots, whether at long or short distances, is a significant challenge. The pistol is largely ineffective, while the machine gun and flamethrower prove more useful, though the latter often requires cheats.
Indeed, cheats are an integral part of Grand Theft Auto's legacy, a practice embraced by many players, including the reviewer in their youth. The availability of fun and useful cheats, a hallmark of the series up until Grand Theft Auto 5, is a feature that has become increasingly rare in modern gaming.
Enduring Charm and Design
Despite its frustrations, the original Grand Theft Auto retains significant charm. The variety and design of its cars are highly commendable. Each vehicle, though presented as a small 2D sprite, is crafted with enough detail to be distinct, from the curves of a Volkswagen Beetle lookalike to the angular lines of an American sedan. The car selection also varies between cities, with Vice City featuring more exotic supercars and San Andreas offering unique vehicles like the Love Wagon, contributing to each location's distinct identity. This attention to detail in vehicle design foreshadowed the more elaborate implementations seen in later entries like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Many of the car models bear a striking resemblance to popular 1980s Matchbox toys, suggesting the developers may have used photos of actual models as direct references. Evidence for this can be seen in the subtle details, such as the orange-roofed ambulance bearing an identical 'E' to its Matchbox counterpart.
The soundtrack is another highlight, featuring a collection of credible-sounding radio stations filled with genuine earworms. The ability to play the game's music directly from the PlayStation disc in a standard CD player was a nifty feature of the era, and one the reviewer actively utilized by recording the tracks onto cassette.
Grand Theft Auto also famously weaponized controversy, a tactic that served as free marketing. While not the first game to feature gratuitous violence—Death Race in 1976 and Carmageddon in 1997 preceded it—the public outcry surrounding GTA was significant. Even then, the reaction felt somewhat overblown, especially considering titles like Die Hard Trilogy, released a year earlier, also featured graphic pedestrian interactions. However, the original GTA certainly pushed boundaries with content that might be considered too grim for the satirical tone of the modern series, such as mowing down lines of Hare Krishnas or assassinating the President.
Legacy and Conclusion
Like a primitive tool, the original Grand Theft Auto is hard, cumbersome, and undeniably flawed. Yet, it remains a valuable artifact that established the open-world sandbox genre. Fearless but difficult, it may be challenging to recommend to those who didn't experience it in its prime. However, re-experiencing its prehistoric brand of open-world freedom in the context of its successors is a fascinating endeavor. It is a game that demands patience, precision, and, perhaps most anachronistically, a paper map.