My Gaming Experience - GTA 1 & 2

I started playing GTA undoubtedly due to the influence of my older brother. Despite the games having ‘Parental Guidance’ stickers on the box, my parents were unfazed: we lived in rural Sussex; there were no hookers to shank. The most we were able to do was go on a sheep-massacring rampage, and we just weren’t that impressionable. Occasionally my mother would peer over my shoulder as I violently pulled a policeman out of his car, leapt into it and sped it down a fictional American city street, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Although, come to think of it, she did then refuse to help me practise when I was learning to drive eight years later…

The first GTA game took place in the highly-pixellated, mean city streets of some Los Angeles-esque location, and the cars were as colourful as My Little Ponies. The tiny human that you operated (this is all before the franchise moved from bird-eye view to first-person playing) moved stiffly, spent more time bumping into cars than stealing them and frustratingly wasn’t able to go into buildings. (Unfortunately, the GTA phase shared time with my Sims phase, so while I enjoyed running over pedestrians, I also wanted to be able to give my avatar a shower and then gain a Cooking Skill afterwards).

GTA 2 was a whole other ball game. You were more mobile, could go up stairs, jump over cars a lot more easily, and – the best part of all – could earn yourself a ‘gang’ if you knew where to find them. Your gang would consist of four people who were meant to fight for you but effectively just got killed quicker than you did, so the only bonus was that they gave you more time to get away. When I played with my brother, I used to infuriate him because I would insist on hijacking ice cream vans rather than the much faster police cars. This was for several reasons: I could play the tinkly ice cream tune whilst killing anyone who happened to be walking on the sidewalk (I guess there’s some sort of perverse satisfaction in that – ‘You want an ice cream? NO, YOU’LL DIE INSTEAD’), it was good for playing Dodgems and barging into other cars and not being the one to blow up first, and, being far, far slower than any other choice of car (apart from, perhaps, a bus), it was a lot more manageable than those crazy police cars.

GTA is where I learnt about different weaponry, GTA is where I bred my love for flamethrowers (which continued to be my weapon of choice for the rest of the '90s and into the new millennium with games like Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament and Duke Nukem), and GTA is where I learnt that if you cause a massive traffic jam and then throw a Molotov cocktail into the middle of it, you get one big-ass explosion. And these are the sort of things that you want your kids to be growing up with, right?

You can download GTA 1 and 2 for free, courtesy of developers Rockstar Games, at this link

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