The era we’re firmly into by 1998, led by the PlayStation, was a tough one for a lot of British developers, but it was also a brilliant time for others. Here is the biggest name of all to emerge from it. As a game, as opposed to a series or something bigger still, though, Grand Theft Auto exists in a weird space. It was, by most standards, a huge success, but was later eclipsed to the point it’s no longer what the series is remembered for. In history, it’s as at least much a platform for the quite different Grand Theft Auto III, and everything after, as it is a monument in its own right.
Part of the reason is that developers DMA Design left so much there to be improved on. The era was widely one of games making the leap into proper full 3D, but DMA sidestepped that whole issue by making a game ambitious enough in other ways to get away with barely having more than two dimensions. Though Grand Theft Auto is still very ragged at the edges even so, as is clear every time your car comes to a dead stop against a sign rendered invisible from above by having a thickness of 1 pixel. The game ended up a huge success almost despite itself, a triumph of concept (and marketing) which the execution just barely does enough to keep up with.
The concept is simple and brilliant, and not so far from acknowledged influence Elite, transferred from space to a modern city. You have a huge area to explore and within it you can do what you like. This crucially includes stealing any car and driving wherever you want, listening to the radio. Apparently you, the player, can even put a music CD in your console and listen to that, although playing on my PS2 means this feature not working and losing my opportunity to cruise around Liberty City to Perfume’s “Baby Cruising Love”, which I’m a little sore about. The radio tracks included are a pretty enjoyable bunch, though. The camera zooms in and out as you speed up or slow down, and you take your place in the iconic mid-’90s genre of news channel car chase footage. Even if the game had been released on the Amiga as Race ‘n’ Chase as once planned, and flopped, that part would have been a great thing.
The fact that driving is the focus goes through everything, more than I realised would be the case from the game’s reputation. You have to get to places fast in a way that you only can by car. The cool tunes only play when you get in a car. And most strikingly, the game’s controls are based around a car as the default. When you start off on foot, you hold the X button to move forwards and use the direction pad to turn left and right, the first game I’ve encountered to use this approach for a person. In Grand Theft Auto, even when you aren’t in a car, you are a car. A human car in potentia, waiting to be let loose.
Beyond the enjoyment of driving around fast in whatever you can find, Grand Theft Auto is an odd kind of mix. You have some missions, with a choice of which one to take on at any point in time, and you have to earn enough points to get access to new missions and locations. That’s not so different for an open world game. It’s broadly the same as Super Mario 64, for instance. Mario had to collect stars to get the chance to collect more stars. Each star was a set goal within itself, though. Grand Theft Auto gives you points for everything, with missions just a small part of it. Missions give you multipliers for your points, but you can get them from doing all sorts of other things too, as you try to complete the initial task of reaching a million points. At a time when high scores were falling further out of fashion, it combines the new and the completely old school.
The scoring system also played into DMA’s hands when controversy-baiting. The previous year, a key difference between Die Hard Trilogy’s permissible pedestrian blood-splatter and Carmageddon’s initial British Board of Film Classification no-go was that the latter kept score when you ran people over. Even as video games were transforming, the high score concept lived on in the public imagination, and “you get points for killing pedestrians” was a concept almost anyone could grasp and run to a tabloid with.
Really, the scoring system’s task is to nudge the player into having fun with their freedom, which the game is not subtle about emphasising. You drive past big information signs which give you hints, and one told me “Doing the unexpected often brings greater rewards than following orders”. Some of the most fun I had playing was in the creative ways things could go wrong. In a mission where I was charged with an explosive tanker, I tried to go under a bridge, and prematurely blew it up, and it was great. Shortly afterwards I ran upstairs to a subway station and onto the track, and got electrocuted to death. The inventive killings are the most obvious link back to Lemmings, the game that put DMA in a place to make Grand Theft Auto, and Lemmings’ own origins as a game in which tiny people died in various gruesome ways. Arguably it harks back further still to the attitude of older British games like Dizzy.
For all its clear British heritage, of course, Grand Theft Auto is set in America. Specifically, in a renamed but obvious version of New York, followed by a Californian amalgamation and a version of Miami. The game is named after an offence in American law, and the manual comes printed with text from that law. A lot hinges on its place in an imaginary America. Its world of gangsters isn’t the most fully developed, though more fully developed than anything else about its cities, which are basically a set of district names and rough textures. The idea that people are just regularly going around shooting each other and crashing into cars on the freeway and are largely being left to it, until they really take it far enough to get the police to come crashing in, only works in a fantasy vision. Squaring that with the kind of violent grittiness that the game works so hard (and often so crassly) to keep around takes a particular setting. A setting which Brits think they know inside out but only at a remove, through exports to their screens, is perfect. Awe and contempt mix; contradictions are resolved in one easy sweep. Of course everyone is crazy and has a gun, it’s America.
That’s not an idea that Grand Theft Auto does that much to take any further than that. The satire, in this game, doesn’t amount to much more than a flimsy defence for juvenile humour and casual racism and misogyny. The freedom and versatility the game gives the player has to do a lot to compensate, and does. Its cover art, at least, hits on something else, though. Grand Theft Auto is a playground made out of a hyper saturated, morally vacant vision of America, a larger-than-life place run on the rules of TV, in which only your score counts. Its cover sums that up in one New York image. It’s of a car in front of Trump Tower.
