648 - Grand Theft Auto
Best Games - Grand Theft Auto
If you made a pie chart of the entire video game industry, every property and title broken out into its own set of wedges, there would be a very slim few that would be instantly identifiable. Pokémon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto.
Modern Grand Theft Auto is an enormous blockbuster juggernaut absolutely stuffed with ways to dick around in a comically violent world. They are massive, sprawling things with massive, sprawling budgets. The only part of that description that doesn’t fit with the first entry in the series, is the budget.
Before GTA3 turned the entire franchise into a 3D, third person, narrative adventure, it was a top down crime playground.
It’s sort of amazing, going back to the original, how much of the series is already built out in that first entry. GTA is probably the most realized, living world available in a game at that time. The city (Liberty City, San Andreas, or Vice City) is just moving and living at all time. The streets are filled with traffic, the sidewalks are full of people. Emergency vehicles, taxies, and busses go about their business. And all of it is a sandbox waiting for you to create havoc.
That’s the thing that makes GTA fun. Havoc.
Yes, of course, there are missions that you need to complete to advance in the game, and yes, most of them require you to play things safe. You will need to drive safely, or get from place to place without drawing too much attention to yourself. But all of those are thin barriers set up around the things you really want to do in the game. Drive fast, crash cars, fire guns, wreck things, hurt people, etc. etc. etc. You can cut loose at any moment, but you won’t because that tension is also fun. Knowing that you can do anything at any moment, but choosing to play the game “by the rules” is very entertaining. You aren’t forced to play GTA in any specific way, but you are frequently asked. How you play is entirely up to you.
Most of the time when I played GTA, I would just cause as much chaos as possible and see how long it took the increasing police presence to stop me. Much the same way that people play the later entries in the series. When I got tired of that, I would play through the missions and progress the story. That is also the way people tend to play the later entries in the series.
More than the living open world, more than the over the top crime story, that is the success of GTA as a bit of game design. Allowing you to do anything you want at any time, but offering the player voluntary constraints on that type of play that you can dip in and out of at will, is a very sticky way to build a game.
Knowing what will be fun, and then letting players decide for themselves how to engage with that fun is what makes Grand Theft Auto one of the Best Games.