Grand Theft Auto (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
421A playthrough of Take 2 Interactive's 1998 action game for the Sony PlayStation, Grand Theft Auto.
Here are some timestamps if you'd like to jump to a specific level:
Liberty City
Stage 1, Gangsta Bang 1:45
Stage 2, Heist Almighty 25:42
San Andreas
Stage 3, Mandarin Mayhem 1:07:29
Stage 4, Tequila Slammer 2:19:21
Vice City
Stage 5, Bent Cop Blues 3:08:29
Stage 6, Rasta Blaster 4:43:24
The very first Grand Theft Auto is nearly twenty-five years old at this point, and it's funny to think back on what an unlikely beginning it was to one of the titans of video game franchises.
When the PC game originally released back in 1997, it didn't start off as the mega-hit that people today might imagine it to have been. I seem to remember the reviews being pretty middling, and it took it awhile to gain steam, but everyone that I knew seemed to love it. I did, too.
Even when it was brand new, the graphics were ugly and the tank controls felt designed to irritate, but the game offered a level of freedom that was virtually unmatched by any other game of its time, and it did so several years before the series hit its stride with the revolutionary Grand Theft Auto III.
Alongside The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, the original Grand Theft Auto set down a lot of the tenets that came to define the modern, open-world "sandbox" game. You could accept the missions the game handed out, or you could ignore them completely and find other ways to entertain yourself. You could seek out optional side missions and hidden caches of power-ups, take a tour of the city, or be a terrorist. I think most people usually went with that last option.
There was something super cathartic about pulling someone from their car, running them over with it, and then fleeing from the cops as you went on a massive murder spree that inevitably ended in a fiery explosion. It sounds completely tasteless to say so in the current cultural climate, but the game was unapologetically violent, and that was one of its biggest draws.
But there was a storyline and an actual structure here for those that wanted such things. The game was split into six stages: the first two took place in Liberty City, the third and fourth in San Andreas, and the final two in Vice City. Each had a score goal, measured in cash earned, and however you reached that goal was up to you. You could work your way through all of the gangster jobs that were fed to you by local crime lords, or you could just wander around raining death and destruction down upon on anyone unlucky enough to cross your path. To anyone that had ever thought that they'd like to spend a day in the shoes of Tony Montana, here was that chance.
It had more than its fair share of rough edges - the controls were incredibly awkward, the lack of an in-game minimap and the Micro Machines-style top down view made navigation frustrating, and it was way too easy to get killed or to fail a mission through no real fault of your own - but the core premise was so compelling that most of us were willing to put up with those annoyances. (The radio programs also helped - there was some real gold there if you ever bothered to listen to them.)
The PlayStation port was a good representation of the original PC game, too. The graphics were chunkier and the framerate was lower, but all the content was still there and the gamepad made for a very nice improvement over the original's keyboard control scheme. It's actually pretty impressive that the game runs so well on the console considering the size of the stages and that the game only stops to load at the beginning of each level.
It wasn't nearly as good as the later games in the series, but the first Grand Theft Auto laid the foundation for everything that continues to define the GTA name to this day. Everyone has to start somewhere, and these were some big baby steps.
Way to go, Rockstar.
And a random side note to anyone who is considering buying the recently released remasters of the PS2 GTA games: please don't. They're dumpster fires that piss all over everything the series has accomplished over the years, and they aren't worth your money.
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