TG’s 50 greatest games of all time: Grand Theft Auto (but just the demo)

Released in 1997 to a soundtrack of middle-aged tuts from the tabloid-reading parents who refused to see the funny side of pinching cars and engaging in wanton criminal activity, Grand Theft Auto was one of the PlayStation 1’s most controversial titles. That also meant the younger players who were kept at an administrative arm’s length by the BBFC 18 certificate instantly considered that somehow playing it was now the single most important thing in life.

Dundee’s DMA Design was known for the Lemmings game before this tabloid-troubling new title came alone. These were a subversion of the happy-clappy, child-friendly titles that dominated the previous 16-bit era, the core activity being martialling a bunch of rodents away from committing mass suicide. Compared to what the Scottish studio was cooking up next though, Lemmings would soon seem as tame as a three-hour documentary about tea towels, presented by Alan Titchmarsh.

This would be the prototype for a series that would go on to define and redefine the games industry over several generations, and it began with a top-down look at a city, a player-character standing in the middle of the screen as cars whizzed past them like Micro Machines, and a ringing telephone.

The devious devs at DMA had initially prototyped it as a cops and robbers game that you played the law enforcement in, before deciding that it was actually far more fun to be the criminal on the loose.

What proved so frown-inducing to the likes of Mary Whitehouse at the time wasn’t just that you were a criminal, but rather the freeform nature of the criminality you could exact on Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City. This was, in the earliest form, an open world. What you did in it was up to you, and yes there are guns littered around the streets waiting to be picked up and a dedicated button that steals cars when you tap it. But no-one’s making you, say, steal a sports car, drive it along the pavements and then get out and start firing your submachine gun indiscriminately. It just so happened that this was exactly what every single player did when they realised they could.

Hence the BBFC 18 rating, of course, which meant that a huge proportion of the players who thought stealing cars and shooting stuff was cool were unable to go out and buy the game. But there was something of a loophole, and it came mounted on magazine covers.

The Grand Theft Auto demo came with issues of Official PlayStation magazine, and let players loose in Liberty City for just a couple of minutes at a time. It wasn’t long enough to complete many missions or feel a sense of progress, but it was plenty of time to experiment with the newfound freedom that an open-world.

So for a whole generation of gamers, it’s that demo, not the perfectly-good-but-inaccessible full game, which sits among the pantheon of greats. We shall never speak of the things we did in Liberty City within that two-minute window, but we can’t undo them now, nor deny the grin on our face while we did them. It was a lightning in a bottle moment for gaming, ripe for playground anecdotes and the grounds for a whole social hierarchy based on who had the demo, and might let you come round this evening and have a go on it.

Grand Theft Auto VI will probably be a bit better than that 1997 PS1 game, and you can quote us on that. But it’s unlikely to feel like the same kind of taboo, the same groundbreaking, dangerous experience that its earliest ancestor felt, even in demo form. For that, GTA, we pay tribute to you.