Grand Theft Auto

aka: GTA, Race 'n' Chase
Moby ID: 417
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

In Grand Theft Auto, the player takes the role of a small-time criminal trying to make it big with the mob. Stealing cars, doing jobs for the gangsters and behaving generally anti-social are the way to success.

The action moves through six levels spread over three different cities, each based on a real US city: Liberty City (based on New York City), San Andreas (based on San Francisco) and Vice City (based on Miami). To finish a level, a certain score must be reached. Stealing cars and crashing into traffic, driving over pedestrians and killing cops all raise the score, but the big points are made through jobs. Answering phones or entering special cars brings mission assignments, from simple "ditch-a-hot-car" jobs to supporting bank robberies or carrying out assassinations. Completing a mission will raise the score substantially and also increase the score multiplier, so that completing the next felony will gain even more points.

Criminal behavior comes with a price of course: if policemen witness a crime, the player's wanted level rises. At the lowest level, a single police car might give chase, whereas at the highest level whole car squads hunt the player, the police set up roadblocks and shoot to kill. The only way to evade the cops is to find a respray shop and get a new paint job with new license plates. This costs money which is deducted from the score, however. But even dying or being arrested are not the end. The player has several lives, and ending up in jail simply results in being stripped of all weapons and armor and the score multiplier being lowered.

The entire action is viewed from a top-down perspective, which zooms out while driving a car, for a better overview at high speeds. The cities are many screens large and can be freely explored. Crates are scattered over the cities, which might include weapons (from pistols to rocket launchers), armor or other bonus items: extra lives, police bribes (used to reduce the wanted level to zero) and get-out-of-jail-free cards (used to retain score multiplier and weapons when busted). Dozens of different vehicles are available for the taking, each with unique characteristics: a bus will handle very differently than a sports car.

Spellings

  • 侠盗车手 - simplified Chinese spelling
  • 俠盜獵車手 - traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

86 People · View all

Team Leader
Lead Programmer
Lead Artist
Programming
Artwork
Map Design and Mission Programming
Writers
Music Written, Produced and Performed by
Audio Programming
Sound Effects
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 75% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 277 ratings with 13 reviews)

Fantastic!

The Good
For one thing it's funny- however, some of the jokes are of an adult nature so kids under the age of 15 probably shouldn't play it (they wouldn't get the jokes anyhow...) The cars act more realistically in this game than they do in some racing games! The controls are right on and the gameplay is great. And the graphics, although bad, make the game that much funnier!

The Bad
The graphics are pretty bad.

The Bottom Line
Don't worry about the graphics. This game isn't for people with 2 Ghz computers and GeForce 3's. This game's emphasis is on good fun and good humour- and it succeeds at both very well! Some of the content is either offensive, innapropriate, or both, so youngins beware!!!

Windows · by Ben Fahy (92) · 2001

The best

The Good
Hilarious! Great humour, lots of fun, cool missions, and great driving physics- better than some racing games!

The Bad
Pretty bad framerate considering the graphics, crude language could be hard on little kids ears.

The Bottom Line
One of the best games ever. As someone else said, "If you don't have a Playstation, get one so you can play this game". Well, he speaks the truth- you must play this game!!!

PlayStation · by Ben Fahy (92) · 2001

Cool, original, frustrating and unsatisfying at the same time.

The Good
There is one part of GTA, which I think, is really great: The audio. This game has a great soundtrack, with all sorts of music (70's funk, 80's hard rock, gangsta rap etc.) and weird samples all mixed into one great musical melting pot. Each type of music has it's own radio station. By default different cars have their radios tuned into different stations. You'll hear techno music in a sports car and country music in a pick-up. You can switch channels while you are driving. I recommend you listen to the CD in your audio player at least once, so you can hear all those funny samples that have been mixed in between the songs. The sound effects are not bad either, the developers paid a lot of attention to tiny details (police scanner, things people say when you walk around with a gun, the little beeps you'll hear when you put a truck in reverse). Too bad there's so little speech in the game, cause the accents are great.

You have a lot of freedom in this game, you can play the missions or just mess around and do some very, very bad things. You can almost wreak havoc without limitations: slam your car into a police barricade, participate in high-speed car chases with the police, hijack, steal and assassinate.

Some of the missions are really cool (like using radio-controlled cars to assassinate somebody), others seem to be included into the game for the single purpose of making you race from one end of the map to the other. Once you reach San Francisco and Miami the missions become rather difficult and some of them are pretty annoying. Before the real meat of the mission starts you'll first have to make a couple of phone calls... great stuff when you have about 30 seconds to reach a public phone on the other side of the map in order to make the call :-<. Somehow I got the impression that the missions were a bit of an afterthought to the open ended crime simulator idea. Hmm, seems like I'm talking about the bad stuff already.

The Bad
Well, like Tomer says, the graphics are really bad. Of course great graphics are nice but I don't consider GTA's lack of graphic polish as a major problem. However there are some other things that took some of fun away from playing this game. I think I would have really enjoyed this game if:

  • You could save your game. I think you should have been able to save your game after completing, for example, three missions. It can take you a couple of hours to reach the multi million score you need to progress. Moreover, sometimes you have to complete a pair of missions (up to 5 or 6 missions) before some other missions become available. It's frustrating to play those first five missions over and over again, but you'll have to, if you want to see what the other missions are like.
  • There was a background story. Games like Star Control 2 offer a lot of freedom to the gamer, but you have the feeling something big is going on in the background. GTA has no background story. Consequently there is no build up of suspense, no "working towards a higher goal". You're just playing for the sake of collecting points. The levels and missions don't really seem to be tied together. I think it would be a great idea to add some RPG aspects to the game and let the player rise to the top of a crime syndicate (I've always liked big, over-ambitious games). But hey, Rockstar fixed that with the release of Vice City.


**The Bottom Line**
A highly explosive piece of software with more f***s per minute than a Tarantino movie. The use of cheat codes doesn't spoil the satisfaction you'll get from this game and saves you from a lot of frustration. It's the open-ended nature of the game that makes it great, not the missions.

Windows · by Roedie (5239) · 2004

[ View all 13 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Weird bug: Endless chases Daniel Saner (3503) Oct 27, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Grand Theft Auto appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Banned

Grand Theft Auto was banned from stores in Brazil.

Cities

The game takes place in the cities Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas. These cities are also the showplaces of the following 3D games of the series.

Cover

When Take2 bought BMG Interactive, they re-released Grand Theft Auto in Europe with another box-cover, which looked more attractive than the previous one, which was quite boring.

Development

The original concept for GTA was that the player was supposed to be the police and he had to go around catching car looters, robbers, gang members and so on. In the late design stages, the team argued among themselves that it would be better if the players role be reserved. After a heated battle they all agreed on reversing the players role.

Doubled Player Glitch

Go to a bike, without weapons.

Press "ENTER" and hold "Ctrl" at the same time.

Take the car behind and smash the bike.

Now you will see a copy of your self.

Dont drive over him, you'll just die :)

Freeware Release

As a way of saying thank you to the many fans of the series, Rockstar released a freeware version of GTA on its website, http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/, updated to support the latest operating systems and Direct X software.

German version

When playing the game with German language settings, it is not possible to choose the female protagonists.

Police Trick

The streets of GTA maintain a finite supply of police cars in the face of escalating crime levels (largely thanks to the singlehanded effort of the player); an ex-roommate discovered that if you can put aside the gratification at delivering the coup de grace, blowing up their vehicles, and instead leave the coppers with barely-functional, heavily-damaged wagons, you can move through traffic largely with impunity -- whenever a police presence would be triggered, instead of dashing to the scene of the crime in powerful cruisers they would stagger on to the screen in the same fleet of dented Chitty-Chitty Bang Bangs you mercifully spared.

Should the police cars blow up, the department appears to instantaneously replace the exploded car with a brand new one with everything in top condition; cultivate their deprivation, however, and you can cause the entire force to limp along while you cruise by in the fastest ride that you can grab.

References

  • In Vice City, you often see clothes that have been hung out to dry above alleyways and roads. Some of the blankets say "GTA" or "CM" - the initials of artist Craig Moore who worked on the game's textures.
  • In San Andreas, one of the missions assigned to the player by Uncle Fu's crime syndicate is the killing of mob boss Don Traegeri. This is most certainly a reference to Don Traeger, who was involved in establishing publisher BMG Interactive in 1995.

References to the Game

The cover of heavy metal band Megadeth's album Rude Awakening features vehicles from Grand Theft Auto.

Awards

  • PC Gamer
  • April 2000 - #50 (tied with Caesar III) in the Reader's All-Time Top 50 Games Poll

Information also contributed by Daniel Saner, Itay Shahar, Kartanym, Karthik KANE, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, Steve . and Zovni

Analytics

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Grand Theft Auto III
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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
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Grand Theft Auto IV
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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Game Boy Color added by Brolin Empey. PlayStation added by Grant McLellan.

Additional contributors: Erwin Bergervoet, Unicorn Lynx, Apogee IV, Paranoid Opressor, Sciere, Havoc Crow, DreinIX, Paulus18950, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Victor Vance, FatherJack.

Game added November 12, 1999. Last modified March 6, 2024.