"I mean, I traded four games for Vice City at launch – Gran Turismo 3, Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, and FIFA 2002, no less – and still owed the shopkeeper money at the other end."
Again, it may seem odd to wax lyrical about these features in 2021, but this was alien to the Grand Theft Auto series at the time, whereby, despite having their stories unfold within their respective sandboxes, Vice City's forerunners were pretty much entirely linear, at least from a structural standpoint. For context, in late 2002 Battlefield 1942 had only just stormed the online warzone for the first time, and online games were pretty much exclusively tied to PC – with '90s gems such as Starcraft, Ultima Online, and even Doom and Quake championing online play in varying degrees years earlier.Īn online, GTA-inspired venture was as such some ways away, and yet Vice City's latter stretch of empire-building nonchalantly folds in asset and property buying, passive earning, and a fair whack of grind – all central tenets of modern day GTA Online. It had no online component whatsoever, and was thus story-driven from start to finish tasking players with completing contained missions assigned by specific contacts dotted around the map, until ultimately funnelled towards a narrative conclusion. What does the Grand Theft Auto community think of the GTA Trilogy's turbulent launch?Ī full decade before the arrival of GTA Online – and six years and a console generation prior to 2008's GTA 4 – Vice City of course posed a very different Grand Theft Auto experience to the one we're familiar with today.
The combination of firing up the ignition on that Faggio in the lane adjacent to Ken Rosenberg's office and hearing that iconic bassline and synth pop intro as you pulled into the main drag, then, was pretty special. But bikes in any capacity had not yet appeared in the Grand Theft Auto 3D universe at this point, and while 2001's GTA 3 had a pretty banging music library, Vice City upped its audio repertoire with a slew of top tracks that captured the era. The first top-down GTA had featured both bikes and superbikes five years prior, with its DLC offshoot, GTA London 1969, also including mod scooters. It may seem ridiculous now, but the inclusion of scooters in Grand Theft Auto was a big deal back in 2002. That's not to deny the significance of this abiding set-piece in Vice City.
"Six hours later, and I was totally obsessed with Tommy Vercetti, Lance Vance, and zipping around the sun-kissed, neon-soaked, drug-addled pseudo-Miami streets of Vice aboard a pastel pink scooter listening to Billie Jean."
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