Evolution of Grand Theft Auto

can you think of a single game series that has had as much impact on video games themselves as Grand Theft Auto one might characterize that impact as grand let's go have the time of our lives but Grand Theft Auto has not always been what it is today in fact it is extremely different at least visually and in a few less ways but still some notable ways mechanically as it was when it first came out in 1997 gaming itself was very different back then and you could actually credit Grand Theft Auto for that at least partially and today game ranks wants to take you on a trip through the evolution of Grand Theft Auto now as I said the original Grand Theft Auto came out in 1997 but we have a little ways to go to get there in April of 1995 DMA design a company founded in 1987 in Dundee Scotland began development on a title called race and chase now you can find some various mock-ups for racing chase and you can tell they definitely had the idea for grand theft auto and ran with it recent chase was originally intended to be a cops and robbers style game but the developers kind of decided that being a robber was a little bit more fun and who can blame them the gameplay ideas generally remained somewhat the same however and like I said if you see those mock-ups you can tell they were like this would be a fun gameplay style but it wasn't an idea they had just utterly out of the blue there was a 1986 game called Miami Vice which is based on the TV show that looked very similar to what grand theft auto is it was again that had very mixed reviews and most people were very hard on both the graphics and particularly the bad mechanics of gameplay also you could only get out of the car at specific buildings where things were designated to be happening and it most certainly wasn't what you would call an open-world game it kind of maintained the illusion of a bit of freedom but really you could only do things at certain times in certain places otherwise you were just kind of driving around aimlessly which I mean in a 2016 game would qualify as open-world in 1986 it literally meant you kind of were able to go in eight directions with nothing going on most notably you were playing the part of the police as Miami Vice was a police show Gary Penn the creative director of DMA design cited elite as a big influence as well now illy is quite a bit different than grand theft auto if you ask me but he believed that structurally they were very similar you took on jobs though in grand theft auto it's in a different way and in a much more realistic setting but the team was inspired by that series as well the absolute original thought for creating grand theft auto the idea the purpose was to produce a fun addictive and fast multiplayer car racing and crashing game that uses a novel graphics method the original grand theft auto was technically a 2-d game that was rendered in 3d the map was modeled in 3d but the camera was fixed in a top-down angle the characters and cars are all sprites and the game could have functioned exactly as is if the entire thing were sprites in that respect it was definitely a novel graphics presentation going much further than it really needed to in order to distinguish itself visually from other game if there was no 3d element you could probably make the case that it was just like any other top-down game especially any other top-down game with cars there has been an exorbitant amount of those throughout the years and Grand Theft Auto certainly wasn't the first but even from a visual perspective it was unique to describe the gameplay would sound very similar to what grand theft auto's gameplay is today however it obviously operated a lot differently to the difference in perspective and technology of the time but essentially you stole cars showed up to places took crime lords missions and made some cash oh and you were able to listen to the radio while you did it tons of different radio stations with a bunch of different music colored your experience in the game and in my opinion really made it a lot more interesting than it would have been without it the original grand theft auto took place in three cities Liberty City Vice City and San Andreas Liberty City being New York City Vice City being based on Miami and San Andreas being parts of California Nevada obviously over the years they remained very committed to these settings and like to update them in each generation of the Grand Theft Auto series Grand Theft Auto was originally going to have a four year development time but was actually produced in a little bit over one year which is pretty impressive it was going to be out on ms-dos Microsoft Windows PlayStation Game Boy Color Sega Saturn a Nintendo 64 and it made it to all of those platforms except for Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 the Sega Saturn version was originally going to happen at the same time the PlayStation 1 but everybody hated the Sega Saturn so they were like then no actually let's stop however the Game Boy Color game did come out and that's notable on account they actually managed to fit the entire game in no way changed other than colors obviously and also censored quite a bit because it was a very adult game on a very kid platform but the entire map tile for tile is accurate to the real PC version and although it's not 3d that's still pretty impressive most Gameboy ports color or otherwise were generally abridged versions of the games on account you couldn't really fit the whole thing into a gameboy color game but somehow they managed it the next entries used the same engine as the original grand theft auto but had one very notable difference where grand theft auto takes place in fictional representations of a few American cities grand theft auto London 1969 and London 1961 are two expansion packs that were released that take place in actual London now that doesn't mean they're a map of London that's transferred into the grand theft auto engine they aren't completely accurate but it's meant to be London they didn't really add any gameplay elements but both feature a lot of humor at the expense of British people including heavy usage of stereotypical cockney slang and even a James Bond looking character grand theft auto 2 actually came out the same year in 1999 and shifted the setting to another fictional place called anywhere USA it's a slightly retro futuristic metropolis but says that it's three weeks in the future the setups super weird but who cares there's seven different gangs the mechanics are updated just a little bit for instance saving you're allowed to do it more than at the end of the level if you had 50 grand and happened in it where a church was that was it you could save they also very much ramped up pedestrian activity where NPCs depending on who they are and who they're near might engage in fights there are other criminals including carjackers and muggers and people even use taxis in fact side missions were introduced in Grand Theft Auto 2 like becoming a taxi driver bus driver a semi-truck driver also in Grand Theft Auto two ambulances started appearing when people are injured which you could then steal and just basically cause more havoc however the reviews for grand theft auto two were a little bit more mixed than the originals people weren't very impressed that the graphics had essentially not changed they were a little bit better but not noticeably so at the same time a complex series of business moves had landed DMA design in the ownership of several different companies over the course of two years between Grand Theft Auto 2 in 1999 and Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001 DMA design had come to be owned by a company that had just changed its name to Rockstar Games which had also recently been sold to take to interactive but given the mixed reviews of Grand Theft Auto 2 DMA design knew that they had to do something bigger for grand theft auto 3 I'm an ambitious girl small time so they opted to do full 3d and they opted to do it on the PlayStation 2 at the time the PlayStation 2 was the most popular console and capable of some pretty damn cool stuff PMA decided to use renderware which is essentially somewhere between an API and a game engine which was aimed making development on the PlayStation 2 a little bit easier a lot of people called it Sony's DirectX what they found when designing the 3d world of grand theft auto 3 was that it was completely impossible to fit the game into 32 megabytes which is how much ram the playstation 2 has now for those not familiar the reason why this is significant is because generally data is copied into the RAM where it's executed now because DMA decided that they wanted the environment to appear much more varied than the typical game at the time they found that they absolutely just couldn't do it in that way they couldn't copy things to ram and then execute them the regular game loading process would just not do for Grand Theft Auto 3 as such they opted to stream data from the DVD and execute it directly from there this allowed them essentially to never have loading now didn't mean there was no loading ever there was loading that happened but as you drove around data particularly geometry around you NPCs artificial intelligence really everything was being streamed off of the disk instead of being copied into the RAM now the main executable code was copied into the RAM because streaming that off of the disk would make it incredibly slow and that would suck but a lot of the other data in fact most of the other data was streamed obviously this meant a slower data transfer rate but the trade-off is they were able to make a game that actually reflected the scale and size in diverse environments that they originally set out to do it kind of appeared like a lot of stuff would pop in after you appeared in an area but it really wasn't something that made anyone particularly upset it worked out just fine and it felt pretty natural as you were playing the game Plus as you moved from area to area that was really no loading well a lot of the gameplay elements were essentially ones that had appeared before they were really done in a great amount of detail missions had a lot more diversity than they did in the top-down days because a lot more on foot gameplay was kind of available characters appeared more interesting on account they could move and were actually animated with motion capture and perhaps the thing that sold the city most was the radio stations yes radio stations appeared in the previous incarnations of Grand Theft Auto but nothing like in Grand Theft Auto 3 these were all treated like real radio stations with their own IDs with very believable playlists with DJs real DJs that they hired and clearly everybody in the audio department really cared with a silent protagonist but a plot that actually worked Grand Theft Auto 3 felt like living a crime movie specifically one that involved the Mafia and while storytelling was fairly minimal it felt believable and at least it merged you enough that you wanted to continue to find out what was happening next now I'm not saying that it was some magic plot that absolutely blew everything out of the water and that the world marveled over how artistically poignant it was but this type of storytelling was still really impressive over the next two years DMA design was renamed to Rockstar North well it worked on the follow-up got it 100% pure grade-a going on beyond my friend let me see it there Green's 10 to 20 s used I think we have a deal my friend hahahaha grand theft auto vice city was built on the same technology and included some great new mechanics the most noteworthy of which was purchasing businesses and in some cases just buildings to function as hideout this property management element really kind of allowed you to feel like you were actually sort of taking over the city you weren't just completing missions in exchange for money you were building an empire oh and you were also Rayleigh Oda who was the voice of the game's protagonist as tommy vercetti you had to navigate a similar plot to grand theft auto 3 except for more Scarface liked and seen through the lens of the 1980s crack epidemic the last game to use grand theft auto threes technology was grand theft auto san andreas which aimed to tell the same crime story albeit through a completely different lens the intention to depict 1990s Los Angeles gang culture brought us a somewhat unexpectedly more detailed story those about friendship and family in a way that the other games really just didn't achieve yet hey I'll take a number 9 fat boy give me a number 9 just like he's let me get a number six without still I'll have to number nine number nine large a number six with extra tip a number seven two number forty-fives one wit keys and a large soda at its core it was still just committing crimes with the intention of creating a crime Empire but there was actually character development not just in the main character but in every single character surrounding them in all three games stories hold up in their own way San Andreas is the most believable as a modern video game story there were also a number of pretty big developments in the gameplay a number of them taken from another Rockstar game called manhunt including stealth and improved targeting controls on top of that they introduced some role-playing elements regarding your personal character for instance you could change your outfit in vice city but in San Andreas it was much deeper including clothing accessories haircuts jewelry and tattoos and actually had an effect on NPCs reactions to the character you also had to eat and exercise as well as learn different fighting styles you were able to pick between boxing jiu-jitsu and wrestling as well as responding negatively or positively to the pedestrians of the game on top of that san andreas was a state not a city there was Los Santos which represented Los Angeles san fierro which represented San Francisco and Las Venturas which was Las Vegas what made it even more unique was that you not only had access to the cities and their suburban areas but all of the rural area in between certainly bigger games have been made since then but I don't know if a game is ambitious to adapt the real world to the technology of the time has ever come out since grand theft auto san andreas in fact the next Grand Theft Auto returned to Liberty City and focused only on Liberty City granted it was a much bigger version of Liberty City than that in Grand Theft Auto 3 which Rockstar explains as each generation of games having their own versions of the city or kind of their own shared universe and Grand Theft Auto 4 gave us a version that was very expansive but also more detailed than anything in San Andreas because it took a single location and just built it to the max sure the map was a little bit smaller than San Andreas but not a lot and considering it was all one city it's a pretty big map the story this time was a lot more centered on character development even more so than San Andreas and is simultaneously both the most impressive story out of all the grand theft auto's and the most the most impressive in that it's probably the most detailed even bigger than Grand Theft Auto 5 after it but limiting and that it's very very linear I don't know what it is about it but it feels like the most linear Grand Theft Auto game not that you couldn't break off and do other things if you wanted to but it really felt like a forward moving game which in some respects is great and in others is kind of it's weird it's Grand Theft Auto you know and although in 2009 narrative was becoming a very important thing in video games that was being explored significantly in part due to the contributions that Grand Theft Auto had made to gaming it was still kind of weird you wanna go on a date come on what's wrong with you okay who is she that's the thing it's a guy [ __ ] you but the thing that you have to credit Grand Theft Auto for with is truly finally getting combat right Grand Theft Auto 4 also brought us the very first online multiplayer to the Grand Theft Auto series which had actually been planned in Grand Theft Auto 3 all the way back in 2001 it was kind of rudimentary and basically allowed 32 players to free roam across the single-player world and decide what game mode they wish to play which included deathmatches Street races and variations on cooperative and competitive play a year later Grand Theft Auto chinatown Wars was somewhere between old-school Grand Theft Auto and new-school with kind of a top-down perspective fidgets follow you around in a way that the third-person camera does in the newer titles but looked a lot more similar to the old game Grand Theft Auto chinatown Wars brought in a different mechanic in the scoring of missions telling you how good you completed the objectives that mechanic carried over to Grand Theft Auto The Ballad of Gay Tony which was an add-on for Grand Theft Auto 4 between that and the lost and the damned over the course of a year they basically pulled a Vice City in san andreas but all in the same city still delivering three radically different stories immediately after developing these expansions rockstar began work on grand theft auto 5 grand theft auto 5 is kind of the culmination of they'd been working for so many different things came together in Grand Theft Auto 5 to make this huge seamless multimedia experience that is tough to describe as a game itself it's not a crime simulator it's not a driving simulator it's not a shooting simulator it's not a deep narrative that has many different angles taken as it progresses it's all of these things and more Grand Theft Auto 5 transitions between three different characters in three different areas with three different stories that all interconnect all of them having different special skills and acted just flawlessly become a doctor juice a become a patient I say who is that hello Missy Wow Franklin you never told me that you had a sister I'm Denise Franklin's house me Dan on my mother's old dried-up ass [ __ ] up shut the [ __ ] up written incredibly well in a matter that simultaneously seems very typical and entirely self-aware there's so many different styles of gameplay in Grand Theft Auto 5 and they nailed all of them it's a well-oiled machine that really plays incredibly as both the sum of its parts and all of the parts individually I could easily talk about this game and the things that came together to make this game for another 10 minutes and on top of that it actually created a multiplayer system that essentially functions as its own discrete economy and no not with microtransactions and that BS there's a stock market in it there's territory there's money to be made it's stuff that gamers have dreamed about for decades and in many ways one could say that grand theft auto 5 realized a lot of the things people have said over the years would just be really cool if you could do in a video game can you imagine what's gonna happen when grand theft auto 6 comes out I know I'm gonna lose my mind and you know what that means the comments section hey how about we speculate a little bit there if not I'll settle for just telling me your favorite mission in any grand theft auto game if you enjoyed this video please click the like button and if you're not subscribed now's a great time to do so we upload brand new videos every single day of the week and the absolute best way to see them is a for subscription as always we thank you so much for watching this video my name is Falcon you can follow me on Twitter at Falcon the hero and we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 3,461,630

Rating: 4.9105105 out of 5

Keywords: san andreas, evolution of gta, video games, funny, game documentary, history of gta, gaming, history of grand theft auto, lol, evolution of grand theft auto, gameranx, gta3, grand theft auto, gta5, video game documentary

Id: yfQNCjcCTD8

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2016