Baby’s first carjacking

GAME GTA (SERIES) / RELEASED 1997-2013 / FORMAT PS5, PS4, PS3, PS2, PS1, PSP

16 Do You Remember The First Time? It’s Second Nature Now: Hit W, Watch For Three Or Four Seconds As Your Character ‘persuades’ A Civilian To Get Out Of The Nearest Car, Then Drive Away In Your Ill-gotten Motor. The Animations May Have Evolved Over Time, The Yells And Tinkling Glass Rerecorded At Higher Sound Quality, But The Fundamental Action Has Remained The Same For More Than 20 Years. It’s At The Very Core Of Gta’s Gameplay Loop, Getting You Into Trouble And Getting You Out Of It. It Provides That Regular Rush Of Rebellion, The Sense That You’re Playing Something You Shouldn’t. And It Nearly Didn’t Make It In At All.

Believe it or not, crime wasn’t allowed in the first version of Grand Theft Auto. Cops And Robbers, as it was called then, cast you as the police and asked you to obey the rules. But the project only gained momentum when the developer switched sides. And for Sam Houser, GTA finally clicked when he was sent a build in which you could stop any car on the street and eject its owner, winning 100 points in the process. “You’re a criminal,” original series writer Brian Baglow said in David Kushner’s Jacked. “So if you do something bad, you get a reward.”

NEW ’JACK CITY

Carjacking in GTA III shocked game developers as well as players, but for different reasons. Where studios were used to dedicating a keyboard key to every action – walking, opening a car door, attacking – Rockstar had distilled a series of movements down to a single button press. Afterwards, action games became much simpler to control, without sacrificing complexity. Assassin’s Creed in particular made every button on the pad work extra hard for the player, changing their function depending on context. Not bad for, well, literally opening a door.

It’s perhaps the reason why GTA has always upset the establishment: it made a life of crime look like the easiest thing in the world. The great irony of all is that ‘grand theft auto’ is defined under US law as stealing a car with nobody in it – so the series should’ve been called Carjacker all along.