The Blockbuster clerk wasn’t supposed to let me rent Grand Theft Auto III the week it came out. Even a few Mortal Kombats in, I suppose the idea that some games needed to be vetted by parental guardians hadn’t become part of the culture of rental stores.
There was nothing blocking a younger me and a game series that would come to represent the medium’s worst to hundreds of worried pundits and its best to millions of gamers. And because, to this day, I have yet to hijack a tank just to see if I can use the backwards momentum of firing shells to jump a river, I think that only Grand Theft Auto’s best qualities hold any significance.
Violence and spectacle is a huge part of what makes GTA appealing. But if that’s all it took then we’d have a lot more cornerstone franchises. GTAIII gave me a platter of guns and vehicular manslaughter, but we can’t pretend that Max Payne or Twisted Metal didn’t offer the same. GTA has become synonymous with a very special, cynical kind of escapism. And with the latest entry, Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar North has offered players a level of freedom console gamers barely fathomed before.
Landing around the same time as Gorillaz’ first album, I can vividly remember cruising around GTAIII’s Liberty City night to Tomorrow Comes Today in the sleekest, reddest car you could find in the Portland borough. But the more interesting thing, in retrospect, wasn’t that I was graphing every inch of every jump and lonely dock, but that I wasn’t doing anything else.
Essentially left to my own devices after being told how to hotwire a car, how to get that car repainted and how to save your game, objectives flutter from your proximity, relocating to blips on the map. The player, unlike in Mario, Max Payne, Tomb Raider, Dark Cloud (remember Dark Cloud?), or the rest of the early millennium canon, was free to decide if they wanted to become a menace to society by progressing through the story structure, or completely on their own time.
Mainstream gamers met what became known as ‘the sandbox.’
Pokemon, Zelda and the like certainly gave you open worlds to explore and exploit, but they weren’t worlds to dick around in. Aside from objectives and side-missions, there were few mechanics available to have fun and accomplish nothing simultaneously. The stories within Grand Theft Auto did become more engaging as entries went on, but so did the options for avoiding it motorcycles, jetpacks, e-dating, darts, wider expanses of space that offered little more than teasing the low-gravity cheat and virtual cryptozoology.
The Grand Theft Autos before III weren’t unsuccessful, but after introducing the urban expanse it changed everything about the industry. Less and less were cartoon mascot-hopeful platformers and kart racers, now came True Crime, Saint’s Row, and cheap franchise games cooked up so gamers could steal cars.
But it wasn’t all sunshine and killing sprees. While every major trend brings a sense of sameness, GTA installed a philosophy that a AAA game wasn’t worth the disc it’s printed on unless it came with a budget bloating metropolitan area to commute in. It certainly wrecked Superman Returns, Driv3r and even Rockstar’s own LA Noire, where huge areas of play had little going on inside them to justify the sprawl.
Which brings us to this week. A red carpet of sidewalk ads and midnight launches greet Grand Theft Auto’s fifth numbered entry. Continuing the tradition of narrative focus, now splitting the player’s attention between three law-breaking protagonists, better physics, funnier glitches and weird things we’re willing to do in an escapist venture: tennis, home renos, even its own Facebook, escapism within escapism.
When I rented Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, it was under the radar. No one in class mentioned it. It had a one-page review in Playstation Magazine. I mostly thought the cover art was nice. During my short commute home last night, I saw seven separate parties of people toting bags from Best Buy and GameStop midnight launches, and discussion of the game in every aspect has dominated every outlet of social media.
We’ll probably hear rehashed arguments about the games corruptive qualities, but its influence over our morals is nothing compared to its influence over other games. There are few games as defining as Grand Theft Auto III. And we’d probably be talking about a game like Shenmue the same way if it let you drive a chopper off the roof of an apartment just to see how many flips you can get in.
