Grand Theft Auto – The Legacy Review

Over the next few months, I’m going to be taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t carry IGN’s typical score out of 10, because it really wouldn’t be at all fair to simply pick apart old games published multiple hardware generations ago and make them sweat under the harsher standards of 2026. What we will be doing, however, is re-examining what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release, digging into what they achieved and the legacies they established, and rediscovering how much fun each of them remain today. We’ll also be identifying both the parts of the GTA experience that have seen the most evolution and growth, as well as the parts that remain fascinating, commendable, and timelessly impressive. At the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly sit in my long-term love for this series. First cab off the rank? The original Grand Theft Auto.

When the original Grand Theft Auto arrived towards the end of the 1990s, it was like nothing I’d ever played before, but it somehow also felt like I’d been in training for it most of my life. On the one hand, it was essentially the digitisation of an entire childhood looming over a 2D toy car mat – my diecast collection scattered around me as I simulated countless car chases from above. On the other, it felt instantly familiar to play – like an intuitive yet anti-social distortion of the top-down delights of Codemasters’ Micro Machines. Grand Theft Auto was bold and brash. It was also brutally unforgiving, regularly frustrating, and cumbersome to control. But despite that, I was consistently drawn to it – like a moth to a flamethrower. Nearly 30 years later, I was more than a little curious about how I’d fare playing it all over again, but I’ve found myself with a largely unchanged opinion – continuously stumped by its absolutely unsympathetic difficulty, yet consistently charmed by its wanton silliness, varied vehicles, hilarious sound effects, and trendsetting original soundtrack.

It’s very easy to look back at the original GTA as a product of a different era, and that goes beyond its old school, top-down aesthetic. Its arcade-style approach to progression, which is baked around trying to maximise your overall score for each level while juggling a very limited set of lives, is nothing like the GTA series we’ve known since its complete reinvention at the dawn of the century. There’s no meaningful story here to speak of; just 90-odd seconds of cutscenes where a gallery of criminal stereotypes either pass on their thanks, or issue you direct threats related to putting unwanted things in your butt.

However, GTA was already a product of a different era upon its initial release in European territories in 1997 – and even more so by its North American launch in 1998. The flat sprites of its vehicles and pedestrians give it that 2D-adjacent look, even if people often gloss over that the cities themselves are actually rendered in 3D. But GTA found itself sandwiched between stuff like the debut of Gran Turismo and the arrival of Half-Life, Unreal, and Metal Gear Solid. We’re talking Tekken 3, Thief, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. What I’m saying is that we knew where the cutting edge was in the late ’90s, and GTA didn’t really feel like it was on it.

And yet it still works, and that’s really thanks to the high level of player agency it offers. The three maps may not be enormous by modern standards, and the selection of weapons is admittedly slim, but GTA was unprecedented in terms of the open-world freedom it allowed. It feels unlikely that anyone at developer DMA Design could’ve fully understood just how stealthily innovative GTA would ultimately be, but it nonetheless laid down the bedrock for sandbox action gaming as a whole. Complete tasks as clinically or as chaotically as you choose. Navigate Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas however you see fit. Take whatever vehicle you want, and take on objectives in whatever order works for you. Not interested in completing actual missions? GTA is engineered to allow you to ignore them entirely. You can simply steal cars, wreak havoc with pedestrians, and battle law enforcement.

5-George-K

Make no mistake: GTA is a somewhat clunky game to play. This was true in 1997, and even more so now. To be clear, I don’t personally have major problems with the driving. Yes, it suffers a bit from the jerkiness of the camera zooming in and out. Yes, you’ll bump into other cars regularly as they appear on screen too late to avoid. Yes, some cars are too fast for their own good, with the camera unable to zoom out fast enough (or far enough) to avert spearing into high-speed crashes. Yes, motorbikes are pretty pointless, and I spend more time getting back on them after wiping out than I do riding them in the first place.

Broadly, however, I believe the driving is quite fun – and I suspect a lot of that probably stems from my background with Codemasters’ Micro Machines series. For context, the Micro Machines series was one of the most-loved racers of its era – and certainly one of my own favourites as I grew out of rolling around on the floor making engine noises. Its top-down perspective was really the perfect training zone for a game like GTA, and I would suggest that – in the late ’90s – there’s an incredibly strong chance that a player of GTA would’ve had some kind of previous muscle memory from Micro Machines nestled somewhere in their fingertips.

I can appreciate that without that prior experience there are elements of GTA’s driving controls that may be a little hard to hurdle. For instance, when cars are headed down the screen, from top to bottom, the controls remain consistent. That is, stab left, and your car will turn to its left – and immediately head to the right of the screen. It’s ultimately a car, so it’s entirely logical that left is always left; it’d be untenable to have the controls flip mid-corner. But this kind of thing is printed into my brain. It’s second nature – if not from Micro Machines, then from an entirely analogue childhood of racing R/C cars and quickly learning everything is mirrored when they’re racing back towards you. However, I can anecdotally report this was initially a bit of a braintwister for some of my kids, so I can see how the controls might seem a little obtuse at first. I feel like they were initially treating the car’s direction like a cursor, rather than the car as a discrete object.

The lack of an in-game map spun them out a little, too. Luckily, I still have actual fold-out paper maps of these cityscapes, which are genuinely essential to complete certain missions (like quickly finding the nearest bomb shop before a strict timer runs out). They proved to be a neat novelty for kids from a generation who’ll never know what it’s like to navigate your way to an unknown location by leafing through a dog-eared street directory that smells like petrol and wet socks. My GTA maps are a little flimsy these days but, considering GTA 6 and future PlayStation games in general won’t even be getting a disc, they’re also a fun if now bittersweet footnote in the story of physical gaming media.

Busted

It’s on foot where GTA falls down and, unsurprisingly, the same things that frustrated me about it in the late ’90s continue to do so today. For context, the tank-like on-foot controls are a side effect of the fact that this was a time before dual analogue controllers became the default. Whether you’re on PC with a keyboard or PlayStation with a controller, all you can do is turn left and right, and move forward or backwards. Don’t think of it like a primitive version of a modern, twin-stick shooter like Hotline Miami – you’re really just a tiny, slow car with legs. The Micro Machines-style controls make less sense on foot, and they’ve definitely dated.

The upshot is combat is harder than a $2 steak. It's tougher to deal with clunky controls when just one hit will kill your character. Body armour pickups are available, but they’ll only protect you from three hits. It’s also incredibly difficult to line up shots from long distances, and not much easier at close quarters. It’s particularly tricky to turn and shoot at pursuing police since, by the time you do manage to pivot 180 degrees, there’s typically only time to get one or two shots off.

The pistol is a mostly useless weapon overall, in this case. The machine gun is far more effective, since you can spray a burst in an arc and get at least one round to hit. The flamethrower is the most trusty option, but you won’t see a great deal of it without resorting to cheats.

Details

I cheated like hell when I played GTA as a teenager, and I’d honestly be surprised if that wasn’t the case for most people of my vintage. The action is a lot more fun with 99 RPGs in your back pocket. Cheats are very much an integral part of GTA’s legacy. While cheats have become depressingly rare over the last several generations, the GTA series – up until GTA 5, at least – remains one of the last bastions of fun, silly, and useful cheats.

Gouranga!

While GTA invariably found familiar ways to frustrate me, there is still a pile of things about it that bring a grin to my face in 2026.

I appreciate the variety of cars, and I greatly admire the way they look. Sure, these 2D sprites are typically quite tiny on screen, but each car has been crafted with enough care that they’re not just blobs of pixels that look vaguely like cars. They have terrific depth, and the curves of an off-brand VW Beetle are noticeable and distinctly contrast the flat and angular lines of a boxy American sedan – despite the fact both are simple 2D images.

I also enjoy that the mix changes up between cities. Vice City has more exotic supercars that are unique to its beachside streets. San Andreas is the only place you’ll find the floral-painted Love Wagon. Each city has bespoke cop cars with different liveries and siren layouts. There’s effort to make each place distinct, and the cars are a big part of making that happen. The seeds the studio planted here in this regard would truly germinate in 2004’s GTA: San Andreas, though it’s crazy to think this happened just seven years later.

Moreover, I love the resemblance that many of the cars have to Matchbox cars of the ’80s, to the point where it’s entirely obvious the team were simply turning photos of actual models into in-game sprites, wholesale. Sure, it’s fair enough to argue that GTA’s F40, Diablo, 911, or Viper lookalikes could have been just as easily gleaned from photographs of the real things than toys, but then you spot stuff like the orange-roofed ambulance, which still sports an identical E on top from its equivalent Matchbox model. Hell, GTA’s Flamer has the whole livery from the Chevy they sourced it from – squint real hard and it still says 57 Chevy on the deck lid!

Even more than the cars, I hugely appreciate the soundtrack. So much effort was made to build a series of radio stations filled with credible-sounding music. Credible is actually an understatement considering how many of these tracks are genuine earworms. You could actually put GTA’s PlayStation disc into a standard CD player and simply play the music. This functionality wasn’t actually unique to GTA at the time, but it’s still nifty. Did I do that? Hell yes, I did. I even recorded it onto a cassette so I could play it in my car.

Beyond that, GTA’s completely silly brand of squelching hit-and-runs and over-the-top violence keenly reminded me of how successfully it weaponised controversy as a free marketing tool around the time of its launch. It certainly wasn’t the first game to cause a ruckus for gratuitous vehicular violence. In actual fact, that distinction is owned by an arcade game called Death Race, released way back in 1976, which caused a huge fuss in the mainstream press for allowing players to run over and kill crude-looking pedestrians on screen. But the hullabaloo around GTA was hefty at the time, even in the immediate wake of Carmageddon – which caused a large fuss of its own a few months before GTA’s launch.

Now, even back in the late ’90s I did think the reaction was a little overblown. That is, 1996’s Die Hard Trilogy predated GTA by a year, and that featured pedestrians getting absolutely splattered left and right – complete with a wiper animation clearing the blood from the screen when driving in first-person. But, yes, there’s no denying the original GTA pushed the envelope in ways not even the modern series would attempt today, whether that’s mowing down a line of Hare Krishnas, blowing up a school bus, or indeed assassinating the ‘High Priest of Babylon’ – who turns out to be none other than the President of the United States himself. GTA’s low-fi aesthetic makes a lot of this stuff feel pretty goofy and harmless here, but certainly at least some of it would be a little too grim to sync with the satirical sensibilities of the modern series.

Verdict

Like a Stone Age axe, Grand Theft Auto is hard, primitive, and – honestly – more than a little cumbersome. However, like said axe, it’s nonetheless a valuable artefact that maintains an effective edge to it. Fearless but flawed and endearing but unnecessarily difficult, the original Grand Theft Auto may be tricky to wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who didn’t previously play it during its moment back in the late ’90s, but I can’t deny how fascinating it’s been to re-experience its prehistoric brand of open-world freedom in the context of everything that’s come since. It just demands patience, precision, and a paper map by your side.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.