The mandatory history section

When Scottish developer DMA published the original Grand Theft Auto in 1997, they were by no means beginners. Their history traces back to the late 80s and they are best known for one of the most successful puzzle franchise of all times, Lemmings. It is quite surprising that this game featuring lovable animals that the player had to save by solving intricate puzzles came from the same mind that later imagined one of the most notorious games ever, Grand Theft Auto: Mike Dailly.

GTA, PC, 1997

A typical GTA scene. The vivid colors are not quite "gangsta".

The original GTA was a fairly simple game in which the player could drive in a city with a top-down view. Like previous DMA titles, such as Body Harvest, the player could "borrow" any vehicle - but while this was OK in a man-versus-alien war context, in a contemporary city, that’s called theft. So the player could not only steal any car, truck, bus or even tank, but they could also kill pedestrians at will. Of course, the police would put some effort to chase them down if they did anything wrong. The game required the player to complete missions to gather cash and to unlock new cities.

While the game remained conceptually simple, it was by no means a small game. DMA and its publisher, ASC, bet on the controversial aspect of the title and launched a purposely shocking campaign, orchestrated by famous publicist Max Clifford. Media, associations and politicians alike reacted promptly and many called for an outright ban. GTA cynically benefited from that huge controversy and free media exposure, and eventually became a million-seller.

GTA 2, PSX, 1999

The GTA2 world seems just a bit darker.

The second instalment of the GTA series was fairly similar to the first: simple, top-down, controversial. The game was set up in the near future instead of the 60s, and it introduced the concept of gangs.

The GTA III era

GTA3, PS2, 2001

The Infernus, one of the nicest rides in the game

But what really installed the GTA series as a first-class franchise was the groundbreaking GTA III. This time, the game was set in 3D. The player had a vast and complex city to explore, and the excellent physics engine made them feel the difference between the huge variety of vehicles - on top of that, it handled stunts and collisions brilliantly! Like in the other games of the series, the player could slaughter hordes of unsuspecting pedestrians - or not.

While the two first episodes were highly successful, the top-down view was still a barrier to entry for most gamers. In order to immerse in the game, players had to accept that the game view will be thus restricted, and this acceptance was a cost that many would not afford. With the move to 3D, that constraint was removed. On top of that, the new episodes of GTA adopted the following modern game conventions:
 3rd-person action, enabling them to include basic platform and hand-to-hand combat gameplay,
 contemporary driving gameplay, � la Crazy Taxi: cars may jump, roll, collide and be used in any non-conventional way that gravity could allow,
 Seamless exploration of the environment. The player is free to roam wherever they want, triggering new missions, optional side-quests, mini-games, finding hidden items or just checking out the place,
 Tactical combat. Facts like: being surrounded, height, distance all matter much more in 3D combat than in 2D.

All of this contributed to make GTA a kind of urban Zelda, with a couple of major differences:
 while Zelda is rather linear, with detailed environments (castles, towns) that must be visited in sequence separated by comparatively empty landscapes, GTA is essentially non-linear: its storyline is more flexible, and its environment is continuously dense - all places are equally detailed and important.
 In order to succeed in Zelda, you need to solve puzzles. You need relatively low skills, but high perception/intuition/patience/logic. In GTA, it’s quite the contrary. You can leave your puzzle-solving skills behind, but you’ll need to acquire an intimate knowledge of the game mechanics, and be generally good with a joypad.

GTA3, PS2, 2001

This cop has serious hand-eye coordination issues.

The switch to 3D ensured that players that were reluctant to the previous GTA episodes gameplay or presentation choices could pick up a copy with confidence. And they sure did: GTA III became one of the fastest-selling games of the young PS2 and the GTA franchise, which was relatively minor up to this episode, quickly became the most valuable piece of IP in videogaming land, topping Final Fantasy, Resident Evil or Metal Gear Solid.

GTA3, PS2, 2001

Missions start with a game engine powered cutscene

The following episodes - Vice City in 2002 and San Andreas in 2004 - were instant hits. Both titles were the best-selling games of their year, with about 8 million units sold for Vice City and around twice as much for San Andreas. In addition to their commercial success, critics were equally pleased with the games: Metacritic bestows both Vice City and San Andreas the title of Game of the year and averages their review scores to 95.

The controversy

GTA III multiplied the exposure of the franchise and, logically, refueled the controversy surrounding the title and its themes.

To put a long story short, it is possible in GTA to kill anyone in sight. On top of that, the concept of ownership is very relative in GTA world: cars can be stolen by the press of a button. The character can also have sex with prostitutes, get amphetamine powerups, mug people and collect suspicious white "packages" hidden around town. Further instalments of the series took the concept a bit further: in Vice City, the player could rob stores, run a racket business, and peddle "ice cream" (but since when selling ice cream could get you arrested by the police?). In San Andreas, the player could burglarize houses, run a full-scale gang and indulge in territory wars, among other things.

GTA3, PS2, 2001

What’s written on the side of this van? Hard to read from the thumbnail...

Curiously, what got the most attention was the "hot-coffee" incident. Using a cheating device or a patch on the PC, it was possible to unlock a mode where the character had sex with his girlfriend - both with their clothes on (gangsta-style?). Yet, Rockstar and Take 2 maintained it wasn’t the case. As a result, GTA San Andreas won the dubious honour of being the first console game ever to get an Adult Only rating.

Other scandals involved the Haitian community who resented the way it was represented in Vice City, and the latest call for boycott was issued by the Sex Workers Outreach Project when they realised that GTA players could have sex with prostitutes, then kill them, which SWOP calls rape.

Another vocal opponent of GTA is Jack Thompson, who call the game a "murder and carjacking simulator" and repeatedly asserts that it trains teenagers to kill. Thompson was also one of the forces behind the Hot Coffee incident.

Is GTA violent?

Granted: GTA is not exactly about picking daffodils in green meadows or training little animals to do cute things. But is it the abomination that its opponents describe? I think not.

First, the developers have taken a number of measures to ensure that the game doesn’t go too far. First, there are no children in GTA. So there can be no "Commander Keen" incidents. Second, there in no one smoking. The game has a mixed stance on drugs: while there are allusions to it in the first 2 episodes, the 3rd one is about the crusade of the hero to keep his neighbourhood clean of crack. In GTA III, there were no visible minorities. This had to change for the next 2 episodes, the first one set in a fictional Miami and the other in California. Rockstar did introduce Haitians in Vice City, and African Americans in San Andreas, with a twist: the San Andreas hero is black.

That being said, this doesn’t prevent the player from killing the average joe on the streets, using rocket launchers if need be. How to justify this? Death per se doesn’t exist in GTA. A character which is badly beaten (that includes drowning, falling from a plane, being run over by a firetruck or shot by a tank) will wake up a couple of game days later in a hospital, completely fit. Likewise, theft is not characterized in GTA universe, as new, "free" cars spawn every instant from everywhere. So, the gravity of the player’s actions are pretty much comparable to playing tag. Being "killed" or "it" is just a light, symbolic penalty.

The symbol has certainly its importance. Many argue (and I tend to agree with this) that violence is more about the intentions than the representation. In other terms, if the game rewards you to perpetrate violent actions, it does encourage violence, no matter how serious those violent actions are, or how they are depicted on screen. Is that the case of GTA?

In some versions of the game, the player does get money when they kill people in the street. (setting your PS2 internal language to French, for instance, disables that feature). But frankly, this is the least lucrative activity of the game. A player that would spend its time killing people will get less money than if they were doing anything else, including nothing - killing people uses up ammunition which has a price, plus whenever the player engages in similar behaviour, they take the risk of being arrested, which is a penalty. Conclusion, the game mechanics clearly doesn’t encourage the player to kill.

Is that enough? Probably not. Look at the game reputation! I bet that there are still people in Take 2 and Rockstar who believe that GTA violence is a good thing that drives sales. And I’m pretty sure that Rockstar developers would maintain that in a physically coherent world, you can’t prevent the player from engaging into activities that would result in the death of random bystanders. I think they are quite mistaken. I’m convinced that less violence would result in greater sales. The trick is how to implement it? The quickest, cheapest way would be invincible NPCs. If there is no reason to kill ordinary citizens, there is no reason to make them vulnerable either! sure, they should run around when there is gunfire, and look hurt when they are shot, run over or that kind of thing. But why go further?

The mistake

Gamasutra recently quoted a study by the Video Game Journal in which analysts discussed how publishers decided to develop a title for one of the four large game genres, the genre being sports, first-person shooters, driving and "crime-based action". Arguably, the years when a PS2 GTA game has been published, that game, plus the many imitations, have represented a sizeable share of videogame units sold that year. But does that form a genre in itself? In other words, are there simple elements that can be reproduced to emulate GTA success?

Most major publishers have tried. The result is a slew of "crime-based" games, which look like regular action games with extra violence, crime-related content, and, to some extent, free-roaming and driving. It’s fair to say that none ever came close to GTA’s success, even though some did more than OK (Driv3r comes to mind).

It seems that some people are still convinced that GTA sold copies because it is violent and provocative. While this may have been true for the first episode, today, the opposite is more plausible: GTA sells although it is violent and despite its crime content.

Why does GTA work so well? Applying our quality framework, we can certainly argue that GTA has most traits of compelling games: strong consistency; fiction provided by the storyline, the richness of the universe; gameplay that addresses beginners and hard-core players; tension, as there is always so much to do; and fair game rules - the game is accessible, but lack of concentration in the higher levels is definitely penalizing. At the same time, the game is not perfect: it does have the annoying feature of forcing the player to do things they won’t necessary like. Not all players will enjoy car racing and infiltration and gang warfare and flight simulation, yet beating San Andreas requires them to do all of this, which isn’t very fair.

So what is it that makes the series unique? GTA’s attitude may have been plagiarized, but what constitutes the soul of the game has never been (successfully, at least) replicated. GTA’s success can be explained by 3 factors: total freedom, extreme gameplay diversity, exceptional quality of writing.

Total freedom: I have stated many times that videogaming is really about freedom. And what game offers more freedom than GTA? Freedom is not just about omnipotence. Rather, it’s about giving the player the impression that they evolve in a universe governed by tangible rules, just like ours, where only the very best can still do what they want (again, just like the real world). In the beginning of San Andreas, the hero cannot afford to buy the mountain-top property overlooking Los Santos, drive a tank or pilot a jet fighter, while he is aware that some people in the game are able to do that sort of thing - just like many of us cannot afford this or that. But towards the end of the game, the hero will live in a 20-bedroom mansion, own a super-secret military jetpack, and will have probably driven just about anything with an engine under the sun. The fact that so many things are possible in the game, or, even better, become possible as the player evolves, is part of the jubilation unique to GTA.

Many pre-GTA III games have attempted to grant "total freedom". GTA III’s game proposition is memorable, because, for the first time, it gives a concrete, convincing game form to that freedom, compatible with 3rd-person view 3D gaming: what has later been called "free roaming." The hero is free to explore a vast and detailed environment, and is free to go to certain places to trigger missions, or not. Free roaming is a counterweight to the traditional, linear sequence of rigid levels. After GTA III’s success, quite a few games have logically implemented "free roaming" to give the player the same feeling of freedom. Do they succeed? GTA’s freedom is highly dependent on the free roaming mode. But it only works because there are so many things to do in GTA’s free roaming mode. Players don’t just enjoy exploring detailed environments just like tourists, they like to find hidden things, start one of the many completely optional missions, or just interact with the game world. Games that cannot offer as much wealth of content outside of the main storyline will not get the expected sense of freedom by implementing free-roaming alone.

Gameplay diversity Depending on what you call a "mission", there are between 2 and 300 of them in the 3 PS2 GTA episodes. And not 2 of them are alike. This has completely baffled me when I first played Vice City and San Andreas. All in all, GTA gameplay is rather simple: the hero can move around, fight and drive vehicles. Yet, not only the game mission script engine is incredibly fine and flexible, but the game designers and level builders imagination seem to be limitless. This diversity acts as a powerful drive to play and discover the main storyline missions, even though there is so many other things to do, because each mission takes the player into an unexplored gameplay territory.

Exceptional writing

GTA: Vice City, PC, 2003

Some people sure work late in Vice City... Wait! what’s this? censors must have missed this one

What would GTA be without Lazlow? I bet that 5 years after playing GTA III, most gamers won’t remember the details of 8-ball’s 2nd mission, but they certainly will remember Fernando Martinez’s sleazy business, ads for petsovernight.com and the Maibatsu Monstrosity ("mine is bigger"?). Those Chatterbox talk shows are fondly remembered because they are entirely gratuitous. They serve no gameplay purpose, but they further the immersion of the player in the game universe by featuring the colourful NPC on radio, and generally by promulgating the GTA sense of humour.

Humour, in GTA, is indeed everywhere, and reminds that all in all, this is just for fun - people may shoot each other or chop their heads off on screen, but that’s just for laughs, it’s just an elaborate tag game, nothing more. Radio shows, commercials, puns hidden in location names or on anything written in the streets, dozens, no, hundreds of pop-culture references, game manual, everything is written in the same vein. Even the characters don’t take themselves seriously. While the GTA stories start off like modern-times tragedies (the hero has been set up, his family murdered, he swears he’ll get revenge or whatever), there’s hardly any true villain in the game, any really scary, powerful, awe-inspiring foe. They are always ridiculed, or portrayed as gently insane, like Toni Cipriani whining on Chatterbox: "It’s my ma. She don’t think I’m a real man. Can you imagine that? I mean, I do a mans job an all, but, she treats me like a little boy! All I get is ’your pa’ this and ’your pa’ that and ’you ain’t a real man Toni’ and it’s driving me freakin’ nuts!"

Conclusion

GTA is a fantastic game series that, as a generally non-violent gamer, I feel guilty of loving so much. That’s because it captures, more than any other game ever, that quintessential sense of freedom that makes games worth playing.