Grand Theft Auto review: the 1997 original still has wisdom to impart on modern GTA

To understand how the GTA series came to occupy the near-mythical status it enjoys in 2026, you need to go back to 1997. Frankly there are many reasons to go back to 1997, reasonable property prices and full-size chocolate bars being just two of many legitimate reasons to fashion a time travel machine. We digress: it’s also the year Grand Theft Auto came out.

It isn’t just the releases themselves that tell you why this series is special. It’s the gaps between them, too. Imagine being a magazine-reading, demo disc-collecting gamer in ‘97 having your mind blown by a top-down arcade game where you can run amok in stolen cars (drive amok?) and do crimes, and then four years later that series shows you a fully open world where you can do all the same stuff, but in 3D. What a leap forwards into an unthinkable new future that felt.

It’s important to remember the humble beginnings of the series, in other words, and just as important to remember that with the PlayStation 1’s limited polygon-crunching power and disc space, Dundee-based DMA Design delivered a crim sim that felt like no game up to that point.

The pressure was on the studio to follow up its big hit Lemmings, and one of many prototypes DMA experimented with was a vehicular cops and robbers game where you played the law enforcement officer, chasing down criminals. 

Only when the developers realised it was way more fun to be the robbers running away from the cops did Grand Theft Auto click into place.

What stood out was the sense of freedom. Here was a game that not only didn’t seem to care which direction you set off in, it also actively encouraged the wanton removal of its miniature denizens. Sure, the police would get involved if you started mowing down civilians in your stolen car or firing indiscriminately into crowds, but since evading the police was so much fun in the first place you could hardly argue that acted as a moral deterrent.

It was a hit. It was probably always going to be a hit. But just to make sure, publisher BMG hired publicist (and subsequent convicted sex offender) Max Clifford to seed outrage among the media and politicians. It worked, of course: MPs found themselves having to debate Grand Theft Auto in parliament and the red tops had found a new moral outrage to yell about for a few weeks.

Best remembered as a tabloid-baiting controversy magnet that let you go on mindless killing sprees, the original Grand Theft Auto did also have conventional missions and a gang system inspired by, of all games, ‘80s space trading classic Elite.

The studio’s creative director Gary Penn had come over from Elite developer Frontier and brought with him ideas about taking on jobs for rival factions, as the player did in Frontier’s game. Only this time instead of schlepping spaceships full of magnesium between planets, you were transporting narcotics, stolen cars and fugitives.

It’s a formula the series has religiously observed, ever after. Regardless of the technical innovations and side activities that garnish the modern games, their core is about doing jobs from the criminal underworld, pitting factions against each other, and rising through their ranks to become kingpin.

You’ll do it in GTA 6, too. And it’s all because an Elite developer joined a studio in Dundee during the mid-Nineties to help out on their cops and robbers game.

The genius of Grand Theft Auto’s version is that it all lives in the player’s mind. You don’t see the crime bosses, the illegal substances, the deals gone wrong. There are no cutscenes here, no voiced dialogue between you and your mob handlers.

It’s down to some garbled, cartoonish nonsense over payphones and a few text subtitles to tell the whole story of who you are, where you are, what you’re doing, for whom, and why.

By making you an active collaborator in its crim sim story, Grand Theft Auto is incredibly effective. You’re filling in so many of the blanks after taking one of those phone calls that starts a mission. The onscreen text tells you that a gangster’s gone rogue and made off with a shipment of… a substance that carries a high street value.

You need to track him down, wipe him out, and retrieve the shipment by driving his car to a drop-off location. Really you’re just driving to a map location, shooting a guy and swapping cars, but your mind’s doing the rest.

Although it’s light on exposition and dialogue, Grand Theft Auto is a rich audio experience thanks to the radio stations you find yourself listening to in the car. Another series-long staple that finds its way into GTA 6, it all came about due to the PlayStation 1’s CD-ROM capacity.

Discovering that the team still had some space to fill on the disc, DMA worked up a few ideas about how to use it. Developer Colin Anderson and audio engineer Craig Conner devised a way to bring Conner’s various demo tracks into the game, arranging them by genre into radio stations that played when you stepped inside a vehicle.

It really is still enjoyable to play in 2026. It’s immediate, and simple

It deepened the feeling of having stolen someone’s car, listening to country music or rock blaring out of their speakers. The series would take that idea and turn it into a soundscape that parodied modern media in its entirety, but it all started with some spare CD-ROM space.

And it really is still enjoyable to play in 2026. It’s immediate, and simple. It takes one second to understand the premise, and five seconds to get yourself into big trouble. That purity of experience is too scarce in modern games, and perhaps the original Grand Theft Auto still has some untapped wisdom to impart on its descendents.