Overview
Grand Theft Auto was originally released in 1998 for the Playstation and PC. The game is set in three different fictional cities: Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas. Each city is loosely based on a real-life city. Liberty City is based on New York, Vice City is similar to Miami, and San Andreas is loosely adapted from Los Angeles.
The main character is dropped into the game world and does various odd jobs for the local crime bosses. Progress through the different cities is done by earning money from completing missions assigned from various pay phones.
Evolutionary Differences
A number of major differences exist between Grand Theft Auto's design and that of the later games in the series:
- Mission failure is strict and inflexible. There is no option to return to a failed mission, it is simply gone forever.
- Money can be earned from killing people and crashing cars.
- Three distinctly different cities are included. Subsequent games in the franchise would go on to focus on just a single city, with the Grand Theft Auto III trilogy re-imaging the three cities contained in this game.
- The only modes of transportation are ground-based vehicles and walking/running. Boats, planes and other, more exotic forms of transportation were not included in the game.
- Support for internet and LAN multiplayer game modes. These would not officially return again until Grand Theft Auto IV, though there would be unofficial patches to Vice City and San Andreas' PC versions to include similar functionality.
Characters
The PC version of the game lets players pick from eight characters while the playstation version only lets players choose the four male characters. There is no difference in the characters in the actual gameplay, the only real difference is when players change the characters name.
- Travis
- Kat
- Nikki
- Divine
- Troy
- Kivlov
- Ulrike
Soundtrack
Radio '76 FM
Genre: Funk
- *Ghetto Fingers - "On The Move"
- *Ashtar - "Aori"
- *Stylus Exodus - "Pootang Shebang"
Brooklyn Underground FM
Genre: Trance
- *Retrograde - "Benzoate"
- *Government Listening Post - "E104"
- *Trancefer - "Figiwhiz"
The Fix FM
Genre: Techno
- *Animal Testing Centre - "DSP"
- *Rotorman - "Ride"
- *Technophiliak - "Lagerstar"
The Fergus Buckner Show FM
Genre: Country
- *Sideways Hank O'Malley (and The Alabama Bottle Boys) - "The Ballad of Chapped Lip Calquhoun"
Head Radio FM
Genre: Pop/Rock
- *Reality Bubble - "Days Like These"
- *Meme Traders - "Automatic Transmission"
- *Ohjaamo - "Complications"
It's Unleashed FM
Genre: Alternative/Hard rock
- *Stikki Fingers - "4 Letter Love"
- *The Hounds - "Let It Out"
- *Bleeding Stump - "Just Do It"
N-CT FM
Genre: Hip hop/Rap
- *Da Shootaz - "Grand Theft Auto"
- *Slumpussy - "This Life"
- *CCC Featuring Robert DeNegro - "Blow Your Console"
Freeware Release
On December 23rd, 2004, Rockstar announced that they would be releasing both Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 as freely downloadable packages on their website. The content of both games remains unchanged, but they have been reworked to natively run in Windows XP and Windows Vista.
PC System Requirements
Minimum
- 75 MHz Pentium
- 16 MB of RAM
- 1 MB VESA-compatible SVGA graphics card
- DOS 6.0 or Win95/98
- 80 MB hard disk space
- Sound card
- Keyboard
Recommended
- 166 MHz Pentium
- 2 MB VESA-compatible SVGA graphics card
- Win 95/98
- Soundblaster-compatible sound card
Optional
- Joystick or gamepad
- Modem (Hayes-compatible needed for the DOS version)
- Local area network using the IPX protocol
- Serial cable (null modem cable or adapter)
- Video card or 3D addon card using a 3Dfx-based chipset
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