The Decade in games: GTA

Posted by Kevin in Articles, Featured, Microsoft, Portable, Sony, Windows | 2 comments

In order to celebrate the coming of 2010, and what came and went since the Y2K bug nearly obliterated the world, I’ll be posting a few retrospective articles detailing what we missed. Giving us all a chance to think back and sigh with relief in the knowledge that yes, we did kill that end boss a few years ago.

GTA 3 brought in third person, 3D graphics

First up is the seminal Grand Theft Auto series. A series that popped its ugly head in the 90′s with a top-down 2D graphics style crime simulation gameplay mechanic. In 1999 GTA2 was released in the same style, leaving many pining after a full 3D experience within the living, breathing world that featured radio stations and gang loyalties.

Well, in 2001, exclusively on the PS2 (remember that?) GTA III was released. A fully 3D realisation of Liberty City, a faux NYC style city. You starred as a mute character running around the city doing errands based around crime, corruption and the trendy new drug, Spunk. For the first time the game was in a 3rd-person perspective, featuring an array of cars, characters, weapons and even radio stations, produced by the now famous Lazlow…

Based on the same engine, a year later Rockstar released probably the most loved in the franchise, Vice City. Based in a Miami style city, the game featured beaches, sun and a disco. What set it apart from every game since is the fact that it was set in the 80s, making Flock of Seagulls cool… again. Not only that, but for the first time in a GTA game, your character spoke. Instead of playing a mute that simply annotates and gestures when someone shouts abuse at you, your character spoke back. Usually foul-mouthed, it added a huge amount of eh, spunk, to the dialog. Not only that, but the voice actor they hired for the job was none other then Ray Liotta. The story was basically Scarface, but with far more humour.

The colourful streets of Vice City were a fan fave

In 2004 GTA moved forward again, to the setting of 1992. It also moved to California. Not one city in California though. No, a huge open world with no loading times featuring 3 unique cities based on San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In between each city featured amazing dusty desert terrain and back-wood forrestry, all with fun things to find inside. Controversy follows GTA wherever it goes, but this time the issues turned up to eleven, as R* decided to go all trendy and feature a black lead character and a lot of rap music. It also introduced a new system much like an RPG game would, where you need to go eat, drink and work out at the gym as well as dress appropriately based on missions.

On the PSP, Liberty City and Vice City both returned in the “..stories” series of games, featuring a lot of the cast we already knew and loved, but in handheld formats. They didn’t necessarily bring anything new to the party, but the fact that you can drive around Vice City on a device no bigger then most phones .

GTA IV was ultra realistic

For the first time ever, a GTA game launched simultaneously on both the Playstation and Xbox, bringing in the new generation of games consoles with GTA IV. A return to Liberty City which looked a lot more like NYC then GTA3 did brought about a new style and engine to the game. While radio stations were still funny, the story line wasn’t nearly as comedic and the city was far more realistic – a fact that has been bemoaned by fans widely. The story follows an eastern European immigrant and is more true to life then fiction. This time the game didn’t innovate too much, rather it ties up concepts from the previous games nicely. On top of that, three expansions are to be released exclusively for the Xbox following release. The first two releases were Lost & The Damned, which follows a biker gang, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, which rejuvenates some of that old GTA comic strip style humour. GTA IV also featured drunk driving and more realistic sense of violence, which drew attention to disbarred US attorney and gaming hater Jack Thompson. Of course the attention was more likely to spur on more sales then actually hurt the title…

Copy-cat titles have cropped up this decade too. Some of these include The Getaway, True Crime and Saints Row. None of which have come anywhere close to creating the same sense of a real city environment.

So in a decade of decadence and riches in Ireland, we can look back and know that the gaming world was with us, giving us comic and violent crimes to commit from the comfort of our armchairs. Undoubtedly Rockstar are working on the next iteration of the franchise. Let’s hope we go back to the 80s, eh?