Before GTA was a household name and before Rockstar was making trailers like Hollywood studios, it was just a top-down car theft sim with bad controls and worse graphics. You drove around cities made of grey boxes and tried not to crash into corners every five seconds. It looked like nothing and felt like trouble.
And then you’d hear it: GURANGA! You ran over a line of Hare Krishnas and the game screamed it at you like you’d just won a prize. This was the 90s. Nobody knew what tone was.
The first GTA was crude, loud, and barely playable, but it had teeth. It didn’t care what your parents thought. In fact, it wanted them to complain. The controversy was part of the appeal. It was the game you weren’t supposed to play, which made it the one everyone wanted.
It launched in the UK in 1997, and marketing didn’t exactly play it safe. Rockstar hired Max Clifford to stir up outrage. He fed the press stories about how violent it was, knowing full well they’d bite. And they did. Parents kicked off. Campaigners tried to get it banned. The result was more attention and more sales. It worked like a charm and a legendary franchise was born.
My first time with Grand Theft Auto was a demo disc. Back when demos were fun. One level. A time limit. No instructions. Just you, a stolen car, and the clock. You figured it out or you didn’t. That’s how games used to work. You didn’t get tutorials. You got dumped into traffic and told to get on with it.
GTA 2 came next. Same angle. Slightly better graphics. Factions, sci-fi ads, glowing pickups. Still awkward. Still violent. Still weirdly brilliant. But the formula was starting to feel dated. The isometric view could only take you so far.
Then Rockstar pulled the camera down to street level and broke the mould.
GTA III: The City Was the Star
When GTA III landed in 2001, nothing else came close. You weren’t playing levels. You weren’t unlocking missions one at a time through menus. You were dumped into a living city and expected to get on with it.
Liberty City didn’t exist for you. It ran whether you showed up or not. Cars followed traffic. Police chased criminals that weren’t you. Ambulances turned up late. Pedestrians shouted, panicked, wandered off. It didn’t always make sense but it felt real.
You played Claude, a man with no voice and no backstory worth caring about. He got betrayed, shot, and left for dead in the opening cutscene, then did what every good GTA protagonist does. He got back to work.
The missions were short, snappy, and often ridiculous. Pick up this guy. Blow up that car. Follow someone without being seen, even though the AI couldn’t walk in a straight line. It was messy, but it worked.
What people remember isn’t the objectives. It’s what happened between them. The time you stole a taxi and decided to work for twenty minutes. The time you blocked a bridge with a bus and watched the AI melt down. The time a gang turned hostile because you helped their rivals.
Liberty City was the first time a game let you feel like you lived in a place rather than passed through it. The radio stations helped. The weather changed. The city was split into districts with different moods, different enemies, different police responses. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t fake either.
And the chaos wasn’t scripted. It just happened. You could turn the game on and do nothing important for an hour. You weren’t punished for it. In fact, that was the point.
Everything since has borrowed from it. But in 2001, this felt new. It felt bigger than a game.
Vice City: Style, Soundtracks, and Scarface
Vice City didn’t need to reinvent the formula. It just needed to sharpen it.
Same basic structure. Same engine. Same messy gunplay. But the tone changed overnight. Liberty City was grey, cold, and angry. Vice City was neon pink, coke-dusted, and screaming 1980s at the top of its lungs.
And that shift made all the difference.
You played Tommy Vercetti, a man who could actually talk – and did, constantly. He was loud, rude, and dangerously ambitious. You weren’t clawing your way up. You were taking the city by force, one drug deal and double-cross at a time. It wasn’t subtle. It didn’t try to be.
Vice City was a smaller map than San Andreas, but it felt bigger because of the personality packed into every corner. Art deco hotels. Beachfronts full of speedboats. Lowrider clubs. Biker gangs. Strip malls. Every area looked different. Every mission had a bit of flair. And for once, the story had a main character who wanted to be there.
The soundtrack did half the work. Real 80s hits on real radio stations. Fake ads that sounded better than anything on actual radio. You got in a car and didn’t want to leave it because Africa by Toto was playing and you were driving through a thunderstorm in a stolen Infernus.
Vice City didn’t care about realism. That was the point. You bought businesses. You wore pastel suits. You shot your way through a mansion with a machine gun while dramatic synth music played in the background. It wasn’t serious. It was theatrical.
And it worked.
It was the first time a GTA game felt like a fully committed world. Not just a city. Not just missions. But a vibe. A place that existed for its own reasons. Vice City wasn’t a sandbox with some Scarface references sprinkled in. It was a full-blown Scarface simulator, only louder and with better radio.
You could drive around for hours and never do a mission. That wasn’t a flaw. That was the hook.
San Andreas: Bigger, Wilder, Bolder
If GTA III built the world and Vice City gave it style, San Andreas kicked the doors off and said, “what if we just put everything in?”
It wasn’t just one city. It was three. Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas – each one based loosely on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. You didn’t just drive across town. You drove across the state. You crossed deserts, climbed mountains, flew planes over farmland, and rode dirt bikes through forests. And somehow, it all held together.
You played as CJ, a gang member pulled back into the mess after a period of incarceration and his mum getting killed. What started as a street-level story about loyalty and territory control turned into a cross-state crime epic. You went from tagging walls and beating up drug dealers to robbing casinos, working with spies, and flying stolen jets out of military bases. It escalated quickly.
And CJ had more to do than any GTA character before or after. You could eat too much and get fat. You could go to the gym and get ripped. You could get a haircut, change your clothes, tattoo your arms, mod your car, gamble away your money, and get chased out of the desert by men in black.
The game was a mess. But it was your mess. And it was brilliant.
The map was so big you needed a plane to get around. So the game gave you one. You had to earn your pilot’s licence. You had to pass flight school. You had to figure out how to land without exploding. And it still wasn’t enough, because later, they gave you a jetpack.
San Andreas wasn’t trying to be realistic. It was trying to be everything. And it came pretty close. There were stealth missions. Tank battles. Lowrider rhythm games. Parachuting challenges. Dirt track races. Gang wars. Turf control. Girlfriends with specific tastes. And the occasional CIA job.
Most of it shouldn’t have worked. It did anyway.
No other GTA game has ever matched it for raw ambition. It was messy. It was buggy. But it made other open-world games feel small. This wasn’t just a city. It was a state. And you could do whatever you wanted in it.
Even if what you wanted was to fly a Harrier jet into a drive-thru.
Freedom Meant More Than Just Chaos
People talk about GTA like it was just mayhem. And to be fair, it let you cause a lot of it. You could shoot rockets at helicopters, pick fights with the military, load up cheats and spawn ten tanks in the middle of the street. You could steal an ambulance and actually use it to do ambulance missions. Or you could use it to flatten pedestrians. The choice was yours. Always was.
But the games weren’t built around chaos. They just didn’t stop you from causing it.
That’s the part most people missed, including the press. The moment GTA III landed, the headlines came thick and fast. Murder simulator. Cop killer. “Ban this sick filth” and so on. Every politician who’d never held a controller was suddenly an expert. News outlets jumped on it, knowing full well they’d never played it either. They didn’t care what the game actually let you do. They cared that you could do it.
And because controversy sells, GTA kept selling.
But under the headlines, the games gave you options that had nothing to do with rampages. You could roleplay. You could explore. You could buy property, build income, customise your car, work through side jobs, and spend hours just driving and listening to the radio. That’s what made the freedom real. You weren’t forced into violence. You were just never punished for choosing it.
That’s the difference.
Other open-world games had missions. GTA had systems. If you ignored a gang, they’d ignore you. If you picked a fight, they’d remember. If you kept going back to the same areas, the world noticed. Police got tougher. Gangs turned hostile.
And you didn’t have to be the villain. But you could.
That choice – quiet or chaos, smart or stupid – is what made the trilogy more than just games with big maps. They were worlds that didn’t care how you played them. And that’s exactly what made people care so much.
They Changed How Games Were Made
After GTA III hit, the industry shifted. Not slowly. Immediately. Everyone saw what Rockstar had done and started scrabbling to build their own version. Suddenly, every publisher wanted an open world. Not because they understood what made it work, but because they saw the numbers.
You got a wave of imitators. Some decent, most forgettable. True Crime. The Getaway. Driver 3. Saints Row came later and leaned hard into the chaos, which at least made sense. But none of them had that same balance. They copied the size. They copied the crime. They didn’t copy the details.
Rockstar built functioning cities. People walked routes. Shops opened and closed. Traffic responded to accidents. You could shoot someone, drive away, come back later, and see the ambulance still dealing with the scene. These weren’t systems bolted on for decoration. They were part of how the world worked.
The radio stations weren’t just background noise. They carried fake news reports, ads, and talk shows that tied into the story. Major missions got mentions. World events like riots or explosions were echoed back to you. It made the city feel more alive, even if the reaction was mostly smoke and mirrors.
That was new. That mattered.
Other studios built open-worlds like empty stages. Rockstar built environments that ran with or without you. That’s why players didn’t mind spending hours doing nothing. The world had a rhythm to it. You just got to interrupt it sometimes.
Most of the clones didn’t get that. They slapped side missions on a big map and hoped for the best. But they didn’t have the world underneath to support it.
This is the part that still gets missed today. The GTA trilogy didn’t sell just because you could cause chaos. It sold because it trusted you to play the way you wanted and because the world made that fun, even if you ignored the story entirely.
That wasn’t standard in 2001. It is now.
Then Everyone Tried to Copy It and Got It Wrong
The success of the trilogy turned GTA into a genre. Everyone wanted a piece of it. Big city. Open map. Car theft. Radio stations. The checklist was easy to copy. The hard part was everything else.
True Crime added cop missions but forgot to make the world feel alive. Driver 3 wanted to be cinematic and open-ended but handled like it was underwater. Saints Row started as a clone and only found success when it gave up and leaned into the nonsense.
You could see the structure, but none of the rhythm.
The trilogy trusted players to figure things out. It didn’t explain itself. It didn’t care if you played it wrong. You could fail a mission and reload, or you could spend an hour doing nothing and still feel like you’d played something worthwhile.
Most of the copycats didn’t have that confidence. They held your hand. They funnelled you through missions. They gave you freedom, then yanked it away the moment you stepped off the path. They were worried you’d get bored. GTA never worried about that.
The trilogy didn’t beg for your attention. It gave you a working world and let you poke at it. That’s why people kept coming back. Not because the mission design was perfect. Not because the combat was tight. But because the game didn’t care what kind of player you were.
Everyone else focused on the chaos. Rockstar focused on the systems that made the chaos fun.
That’s what they got wrong.
Why They Still Matter (Even If They Aged Like Milk)
Let’s be honest. The trilogy hasn’t aged well. The gunplay is clumsy. The AI is thick. The driving is twitchy. The camera tries to kill you during alleyway shootouts. Go back and play GTA III today and you’ll spend the first ten minutes just trying to remember how to get in a car without punching it.
And yet… they still matter.
Because beneath all the jank, there’s ambition. These games weren’t trying to be polished experiences. They were trying to do things no one else had even attempted. They weren’t afraid to fail, and they failed in some glorious ways.
You didn’t play them for precision. You played them because they offered something games weren’t offering at the time: choice, scale, mood, and a bit of anarchy.
And they nailed the tone. GTA III was bleak and cold. Vice City was all flash and ego. San Andreas was sprawling, loud, and full of contradictions. Each one felt like it was made by people with an actual point of view, not just a list of features to tick off.
Modern games struggle with that. You get open-worlds filled with tasks but no flavour. Characters with twelve dialogue options but nothing to say. Everything polished until it’s smooth and boring.
The trilogy didn’t worry about being safe. It gave you broken systems, wild swings, and some truly stupid design choices. But it did it with confidence.
That’s why people still bring them up. Not because they want to replay the exact same missions. But because they remember the feeling of stepping into a city and thinking, “What happens if I just mess around for a bit?”
That feeling is harder to find now.
Final Word: Not Perfect, But Permanent
The trilogy isn’t sacred. It’s dated, clunky, and unforgiving in places. But it left a mark. It didn’t just change Rockstar’s future, it changed what people expected from games.
Before this, most games were levels. After this, they were places.
You didn’t follow a path. You made one. You didn’t finish a mission and log out. You stole a moped, drove into a lake, restarted the game, and did it all over again because you could. That kind of freedom was rare. Still is.
GTA III made the world feel alive. Vice City gave it style. San Andreas pushed the limits. Together, they reshaped what open-world meant. Other games have done it bigger, done it cleaner, but none of them landed the timing like these did.
You can mock the old controls. You can laugh at the physics. You can point out that the Definitive Editions were a mess. Fine. But those first versions – the ones we played on dusty PS2s and chunky PCs – set the tone for a generation.
You remembered them. The missions, the music, the streets, the chaos. They stick.
The trilogy changed everything. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t subtle. But it mattered. And that’s more than most games ever manage.
