As we get closer to GTA 6’s launch, the franchise’s leap to the third dimension is turning more into a history lesson than a memory. But there were GTA games with one fewer D to them, and personally, I prefer their irreverence to what came after—even knowing Rockstar will likely never return to any of its interesting ideas.
Respect is everything
GTA 2‘s intro video ends with the player character getting shot in the back of the head. It is cut together from short promo snippets that show off the sort of things you do in this sort of game—cop chases, robberies, gunfights, doing missions, the sort, except for the part where one of the in-game factions sends an assassin after you to get the job done, and crime does not pay. It is a whirlwind tour of the sandbox fantasy, with perhaps a hint that every death is just the beginning of a new adventure.
Oh, GTA 2. Drum and bass in the main menu—Short Change from EZ Rollers’ Weekend World album, maybe because it was also featured in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or, less likely, because Codemasters’ TOCA 2 did the same, each with different songs. (The intro brings the more industrialized styles of Dom & Roland—look it up, it’s just one guy, I won’t spoil the trivia here—to bear.)
It’s not saying much that it was the best-ever 2D GTA title (there isn’t much competition), but in my mind, it was also the last game of the series that didn’t take itself too seriously. What’s up with the protagonist—is he alive, dead, was the intro a flashback, a flash-forward? The fantasy is tantalizingly loose—and the man is called Claude Speed, very much of the Max Payne mold of gaming naming conventions of the era. Whether he stars in GTA 3 is also a bit of an unknown, because it didn’t matter at all.
The game’s events are set “three weeks into the future” in Anywhere City, far enough from the present to give you an Electrogun but close enough to mostly keep things normal (if you can call challenge missions where you take a machine-gun car to mow down a dozen ice cream vans normal).
“Respect is everything,” for there is an easily gameable faction system, which made it all the more fun. (Imagine my shock when I learned many, many, many years later that you can go beyond just reaching the points goal to get to the next level, and wrap up every single mission of every faction so that their heads all come for you in one brutal showdown.)
It was an irreverent game without hitting Saints Row slapstick levels—churches served as save points that ate up a bunch of your cash-slash-point total, which was in itself a huge upgrade compared to not having any mid-level save system at all in the original, which was nasty considering one took ages to complete. When you enter, a deep, gospely voice reverberates out, chanting “Hallelujah! Another soul saved!” And you watch your money tick down and return to your criminal adventures, with the JESUS SAVES neon sign flickering down to U SAVE. Or if you’re too low on cash? You’re hit with “Damnation! No donation, no salvation!”
It was also a ‘90s kind of unfair game, with the top-down cameras making gunfights exceedingly difficult—and the way most attempts to create extended mayhem ended in death (or at least it did in my case). It seemed right, though with my reference points for criminal violence being more of Bonnie and Clyde and World’s Scariest Police Chases, where things never end well for the bad guys.
Unless, of course, you got yourself a tank, which was quite the fun. Bring on SWAT, special agents, and even the army!
Back then, almost everything was made in-house for the radios, and the irreverent, amusing, silly, yet sometimes poignant radio feeds of the first sequel still linger in my mind, too. They mixed the still-present talk radio nonsense, but the songs were low-key, lo-fi; and nice as it is to have Tangerine Dream, I have a fondness for Standing On My Own.
It’s fun. So why are we never getting this back?
No future, no fish and chips
As Obbe Vermeij, the former technical director at Rockstar North, explained in an interview with GamesHub, “the team who made GTA 2 hated it” and “they didn’t like the idea to go into the future because they had to reinvent everything like how weapons work and everything else.” He adds that “people didn’t connect with the game or its city as much as they did with GTA 1.”
This was bittersweet to read because the retrofuturistic vibes of GTA 2 were what made me enjoy it all the more, and it felt so much more in line with my typical gaming experiences at the time, which were always fantastical in some way. I enjoyed GTA 3 for what it was, but the explicit modern gangster setting didn’t do it for me—more Godfather than Bonnie and Clyde. I never wrapped up the story mode and haven’t returned to the series since.
And speaking of stepchildren, did you know there was a London-specific version of the original GTA? That’s right—1960s, Morris Minis, a different tone but really just a reskin considering the limitations at the time. While I definitely understand why Rockstar would have even less inclination to revisit that sort of idea—there is a fairly recent interview where Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser explained that a Londonized version of the modern GTA experience would be “almost like a psychotic version of a Dickens book,” which honestly sounds great, especially from the man who wrote the London side-game himself. He goes on to say that “we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.”
But I remember it working damn well in Anywhere City, and I can’t help but glance at Fallout: London and imagine a knife-crime-filled, ska-infused, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels-vibed full-fledged modern UK GTA game. Now, that might tempt me to return to the fold. In the meantime, I probably should check out The Henchmen: adding a bit of Hotline Miami to the formula does sound pretty cool.
