A meter at the top-left of the screen lets you keep tabs on what each group thinks of you, and some of the most lucrative missions are only available if you have maximum respect.Īnywhere City is split into three districts: Commercial, Industrial, and Residential. And some gangs won’t even offer you any work until you’ve spilled the blood of a competitor. The Zaibatsu Corporation and the Loonies, for example, are arch rivals, which means completing jobs for one will offend the other and alter your respect. Seven colourful gangs rule the city and its various districts, and your standing with them constantly changes as you play the game. A rare time when Rockstar wasn’t at the forefront of technology.īut of all the systems GTA 2 experiments with, the respect meter is the most interesting and ambitious. “We’ve got complex, interactive AI and fun, elaborate missions.” It adds that while a “typical game these days” will use 70% of its processor time on visuals, GTA 2 has an “emphasis on content, with 50% used for game code”. “We spend time on gameplay rather than throwing millions of polygons around,” it says, predicting the critics. Something the developer actually addresses on the game’s website. The real-time lighting effects and sharper sprites are an improvement on the original, but it’s still fairly ugly, even by 1999 standards. Reading reviews from the time, every single one of them (including our own) criticises the visuals. Yes, even at this early stage open world games were filling their maps with arbitrary collectibles. The map was also littered with spinning tokens, a precursor to the hidden packages, pigeons, and radioactive waste in later sequels. As was the addition of bonus missions and optional objectives, like the infamous Kill Frenzies (later ‘rebranded’ as Rampages) that challenge you to kill X amount of people in X amount of time with X weapon. And, of course, you can drive a tank yourself and unleash your very own symphony of explosions.Įven two years after the first game was released, being able to freely roam the map and tackle missions in almost any order you wanted was still a novelty. By this point it’s a miracle if you survive for more than a few minutes, but there’s a thrill in seeing how long you can last when the city is throwing everything it has at you. Then, finally, at six heads the national guard will be mobilised, throwing tanks and armoured cars at you. At five heads ‘special agents’ (the FBI, basically) with silenced machine guns are sent in.
SWAT vans carrying four heavily armoured officers will come at you. But it’s when you hit four heads that things get dicey. Keep killing folk and you’ll escalate to two, then three, which sends more cops after you and more aggressively. A minor crime (at least in GTA terms), such as murdering a few pedestrians, gets you one star and a police chase. There are six wanted levels, represented by the floating heads of police officers at the top of the screen. It’s the most heavily stylised and visually imaginative game in the series, representing a curious digression before the studio eventually settled on Grand Theft Auto being a satirical parody of the worst of modern pop culture. “As if Havana got transported to the 21st Century,” says the game’s charmingly retro Flash-based website, which is still available online, almost 20 years later. The vehicles are especially stylish, taking vintage ’50s designs-all curves, chrome, and giant grills-and giving them a futuristic twist. Promo material for the game describes it as “a fully dysfunctional urban hell” and explains that the artists modelled the city on apocalyptic visions of the future from the ’70s and ’80s movies This is an early example of cult cinema, particularly from America, influencing Rockstar’s games. While the first game features contemporary caricatures of New York, San Francisco, and Miami, Grand Theft Auto 2 takes place in the entirely fictional Anywhere City, a retro-futuristic metropolis with a bleak, dystopian atmosphere.