OSCAR COOPER
Of all the GTA's I had to pick this one, I will touch on the PC originals but first i wanted to say this game changed my attitude to what could be done on the PS2 and how a single game could influence my music taste and my feelings towards modern culture.
It was a long time ago when those Houser brothers first broke into our lives with the downward looking GTA and GTA2, I had a PC at the time and loved the idea, the series wasn’t without controversy back then either, childrens minds were being demonized by all kinds of things in the press and GTA waded right into the middle of it all with a cop killing, pedestrian hitting, city terrorizing gangster simulator. It didn’t look that special, it had some quirky aspects but it never totally blew my mind like the rest of the series would. GTA 2 had cars with guns poking out of the bonnets which was fun but one thing did stick with me and it was the wanted feature. The stars that appeared when you committed crime and the more serious or persistent the crime the more stars and cops on your case. This to me was a game in its self and massively distracted me from the main plot, Rock Star knew this and would spend the next 11yrs building on that glorious sensation of losing the cops with the radio blearing some gash 90’s hiphop only to swing round the next turn and smash into a patrol car and start the whole thing again (hours of fun)
So 2001 came along, the PS2 is having a whale of a time thrashing the Xbox around with exclusive IP's and just to add salt to the wound GTA3 comes out. Well, its a day I will never forget, people said it couldn’t be done on a systems like the PS2, a fully 3D rendered city with weather, cars and people, all milling around at their own accord. It sure as hell could be done and GT3 charged at that finish line way before anyone else. It was a technical marvel, fog, rain, buses, cabs, vans, planes, helicopters, day/night! My little brain had never seen anything like it, I was struck dumb by the huge amount of options I had at my disposal right from the get go. It was a million miles for its prequel, GT2 must have made millions because the budget for this engine must have cost a fortune. Those two brothers had struck gold and the whole gaming community was jumping up and down with joyous recognition for title that was making ground breaking console history.
The level of detail was outstanding for its day, from the fleshed out different car types to the city dwellers carrying out their daily duties. The engine was developed by RenderWare in house at Criterion and featured some ground breaking draw distance and damage physics not seen before on the console. The story also had a whiff of Hollywood gangster films and the gun play was top notch. You could for the first time in GTA game fire at a right angle from your travelling vehicle drive-by style, this never ever got boring, even reversing if you missed on the first run. Back to my original GTA fetish, the police chase and the crime meter were still in full force, you got increasing deadly types of cops the higher the wanted level. Power sliding around a blind bend and splattering pedestrians while having five police cars trying to run me off the road was the highlight of the whole game for me, at twenty one I was still idolizing the USA as a cultural heavy weight, the 80's had left a solid mark on my brain with great films and music, it never occurred to me that the country was such a big target for ridicule. The Houser brothers relentlessly took the piss out of nearly every aspect of their popular culture and it made me realize that the States wasn’t the huge melting pot of cool I had always thought it to be. On the other side of the coin the Americans also took this in their stride and a lot of them assumed the brothers to be native.
The humor in the game was at a high and low level of intellect, the adverts on the radio and billboards all had a massive tongue in cheek theme. That brings me on to the radio stations themselves, they are incredible, I consider myself a bit of music snob, during the 90’s I was in a band that played off the wall material like Ministry and NIN covers along with obscure Nirvana B sides and Rage Against the Machine tracks, I then went to Hip Hop and got into the Wu Tang and a number of smaller names along with the Beastie Boys and New Kingdom. GTA has always influenced my music taste right up to this day, 80’s songs that I would never normally listen to started to get turned up as I cruised the city. Dance songs, classic rock and electro, material that I would never normally go near became my staple diet, I was being educated and I loved it.
The series has now grown to mammoth proportions, Rockstar are now key players in the market and GTA4 was the only game I ever went to purchase at 1am in the morning of launch. That particular game is in my top 5 games of all time and it is still played by me and friends to this very day, along with its soundtrack that remains timeless in my eyes. I remember saying to a friend that if my Xbox broke and GT4 got stuck in the CD drive and that was all I could play I won’t be that pissed off, another bomb is about to drop in the form of GTA5 and I will be ready to soak up all the new music and comedy, the GTA series is more than a bunch of games, it is a cultural phenomenon and I am so glad I was there at the start.
Regards Oscar