If you pick up a controller today and load into Los Santos, you’re looking at a billion-dollar masterpiece of high-fidelity crime. It’s polished. It’s cinematic. But the original Grand Theft Auto game? Honestly, it was a mess. It looked like a colorful blueprint of a city seen through a drone's camera, and for a long time during its development in the mid-90s, the people making it thought it was a total failure.
DMA Design, the studio based in Dundee, Scotland, wasn’t trying to build the most controversial franchise in history. They were just trying to make a game called Race'n'Chase. The idea was simple: you play as a cop or a criminal, driving around a city, completing objectives. It sounds fine on paper, but the early builds were notoriously buggy. The car physics were wonky. The game crashed constantly. Most of the staff at DMA actually voted to kill the project during an internal review because it just wasn't fun to play.
Then, a bug changed everything.
The Glitch That Created a Legend
In a twist that feels like something out of a tech movie, the aggressive police AI we all know and love started as a coding error. Originally, the police were supposed to just pull you over or pace you. However, a bug in the pathfinding made the police cars absolutely psychotic. Instead of driving alongside the player, they tried to drive through them. They would ram you off the road, pin you against walls, and basically act like they had a personal vendetta against your digital avatar.
The testers loved it.
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Suddenly, the boring "driving simulator" became a frantic game of survival. The developers realized that being the "bad guy" was significantly more entertaining than playing as the police. They leaned into the chaos. They scrapped the "Race'n'Chase" title and rebranded the whole thing as Grand Theft Auto. It was a pivot that shifted the entire trajectory of the gaming industry, moving away from the rigid structures of 16-bit platformers and into the wild west of open-world design.
Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City: The 2D Origins
Most modern players don't realize that the three iconic cities were all right there in the 1997 original. You started in Liberty City, moved to San Andreas, and finished in Vice City. Of course, back then, they were just 2D maps with different colored tiles and slightly different layouts. Liberty City was a gray, grimy New York clone. San Andreas was a sun-soaked San Francisco. Vice City was a neon-drenched Miami.
The gameplay was top-down. You’d run around as a tiny sprite in a yellow sweater, stealing cars and listening to the radio. Speaking of the radio—that was another revolution. While other games had repetitive MIDI loops, the original Grand Theft Auto featured actual stations with distinct genres like hip-hop, rock, and techno. It made the world feel lived-in, even if the "people" on the sidewalk were just tiny squares of pixels.
Why the Original Grand Theft Auto Was a PR Nightmare
The game didn't just sell because it was fun. It sold because people were told they shouldn't play it. Max Clifford, a legendary (and controversial) publicist, was hired by the publisher, BMG Interactive, to stir the pot. He didn't try to hide the violence; he broadcasted it. He planted stories in tabloids. He got politicians to complain about the game in Parliament.
It worked perfectly.
By the time the game hit shelves in late 1997, every parent in the UK and the US was terrified of it, which meant every teenager absolutely had to have it. The "Kill Frenzy" missions—where you had to cause a specific amount of property damage or casualties within a time limit—became the focal point of the moral panic. Critics called it a "murder simulator." Players called it a Tuesday afternoon.
The controversy masked a surprisingly deep game. If you actually try to play the original Grand Theft Auto today, you’ll find it’s incredibly difficult. There are no mid-mission saves. If you die at the end of a long chain of objectives, you start back at the beginning of the level. The controls are "tank-style," meaning you rotate your character and move forward rather than just pointing the stick where you want to go. It’s brutal. It’s unforgiving. It’s also the DNA of everything that followed.
The Technical Magic of the 2D Era
The engine was a marvel for its time. It used a "top-down" perspective that allowed for a sense of scale that 3D games of that era—like Tomb Raider or Mario 64—couldn't match. You could see several blocks ahead. You could see the traffic patterns. The game used a clever trick with "limp" sprites that would rotate and scale to simulate 3D perspective as you drove under bridges or past skyscrapers.
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It wasn't just about the driving, though. It was the freedom. Before this, games usually told you exactly where to go. In the original Grand Theft Auto, the game gave you a score target. How you got there was up to you. You could follow the missions given by the payphones, or you could just spend three hours stealing buses and creating a massive pile-up on the bridge. This "emergent gameplay" is the cornerstone of the modern "sandbox" genre. Without that glitchy police AI and the top-down chaos of 1997, we wouldn't have Red Dead Redemption, Cyberpunk 2077, or even the modern GTA V.
How to Play It Today
If you want to experience where it all began, you have a few options, though none are as simple as just buying it on Steam anymore (Rockstar delisted the older versions a while back).
- Original Hardware: If you have an old PlayStation 1 or a PC from the late 90s, physical discs are still floating around on eBay.
- The Rockstar Classics Version: For years, Rockstar offered the game for free on their website as "Rockstar Classics," though that's currently offline.
- Community Patches: The fan community has kept the PC version alive with patches that make it run on Windows 10 and 11, fixing the frame rate issues that occur on modern CPUs. Look for the "Grand Theft Auto Fixer" tools online.
- Emulation: This is often the most reliable way. Running the PS1 version through an emulator allows you to use save states, which, honestly, makes the game much more playable by modern standards.
Actionable Takeaways for Retrogaming Fans
If you're going back to play the original Grand Theft Auto, keep these things in mind to avoid frustration:
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- Understand the Score System: You don't "beat" levels by finishing missions; you beat them by reaching a certain dollar amount. Missions just give you multipliers that make everything else (like blowing up cars) worth more money.
- Master the Handbrake: Since the controls are stiff, the handbrake is your best friend for making 90-degree turns at high speeds.
- Find the Secret Crates: The maps are littered with hidden power-ups like machine guns, rocket launchers, and "Get Out of Jail Free" cards. Exploring the back alleys of Liberty City is actually worth your time.
- Check the Map: The original game didn't have a mini-map on the HUD. You actually had to look at a physical paper map that came in the box. If you're playing a digital version, keep a high-res image of the map open on a second screen.
The original Grand Theft Auto is a fascinating relic. It’s loud, ugly, and mean. But it’s also the foundation of a cultural phenomenon. It proved that players wanted agency more than they wanted a scripted story. It proved that controversy is the best marketing. Most importantly, it proved that sometimes, a really great bug is better than a really good plan.
Next Steps for Enthusiasts:
Search for the "GTA Max" or "GTA1 Restoration" community projects. These fan-made mods add widescreen support and restore the original soundtrack, which often gets stripped out of digital re-releases due to licensing issues. This is the definitive way to see the game as it was intended—bloody, pixelated, and surprisingly addictive.