Open-ended games: Grand Theft Auto Series

Rockstar’s Grand theft Auto is one of the most popular open-ended games ever created selling over 65 million copies worldwide and it spawned a franchise that is still going very strong today, the original GTA was a groundbreaking game despite having fairly primitive graphics even by the standards of the time, I believe Tomb Raider 3 came out that year and graphically that game looked years ahead of GTA but I’ve always felt that the importance of cutting edge graphics was overstated anyway and if the gameplay or control system is flawed then it doesn’t matter how good the graphics are and Grand Theft Auto just reconfirmed my belief that you don’t need good graphics to have a good game although it is a nice bonus if it has good graphics too. There is no build up or introductory story to Grand Theft Auto, you are just left in the middle of a street, you are told that there is work available at the nearby phones which would give you missions to do but you don’t have to these if you don’t want to, you have only one goal which is a score but how you choose to achieve this score is up to you, you can choose to play the game linearly if you are so inclined and just complete all the missions or you can explore the three cities, Liberty city, Vice city and San Andreas which are based on New York, Miami and San Francisco respectively, steal vehicles which range from heavy fuel tankers and buses to incredibly fast sports cars and sell them off at the docks or go on random killing spree’s and see how long you can evade the police before eventually either getting killed, arrested or getting your vehicle re sprayed.

It was these elements of free roaming play that really appealed to me, it was the first real open-ended game I had played and what topped it off is that it was very funny and was a lot of fun at the time to play. The games violence against law enforcement officers caused a lot of controversy at the time and the game was blamed for everything from juvenile delinquency to a drop in the gross national product, all ridiculous in my opinion and all those who protested against the game were quite foolish and naive as it only served to give the game more free publicity which I think was a major contributing factor as to why it went on to sell over one million copies of the game, I’m still amazed that some people haven’t learned that protesting against games or movies nearly always backfires and anyway I think only someone with an already unstable mind could latch onto the game and consider it as viable way to live their lives. The sequels’ to this game were just as open-ended as the original.