Grand Theft Auto Review

Playing it now is archaeology rather than entertainment. The camera sits so far above the action that pedestrians are pixels, the driving is closer to air hockey than to a car, and missions arrive as text on payphones with a fail state that sends you back a long way. What survives is the structural idea, and it is the important one: the city exists whether or not you engage with it, your crimes accumulate into a heat level, and the game does not particularly mind if you spend an hour doing nothing it asked for.

That last part is the whole franchise in embryo. The score multipliers and point targets feel like an arcade holdover because they are, from a studio that had not yet worked out that the freedom was the product rather than the scoring. It was also a genuine tabloid scandal, which taught Rockstar a marketing lesson it never unlearned. Historically essential, mechanically ancient, and worth about twenty minutes of anyone's time.