We All Miss The Old Rockstar
If my gaming life were turned into a movie, GTA would be the soundtrack. Not quite literally, although the radio stations the series is famous for have soundtracked many a gaming session, it’s just that Rockstar’s signature title forms the backbone for many players’ memories.
For me, those memories started with the original, top-down Grand Theft Auto on PS1. Back then DMA Design, as Rockstar was once known, appealed to me with its gritty, cartoonish, and yet somehow authentic open world design. Most of all, its sense of freedom edged with a famously subversive approach to humour was riotously fun. Over the years, Rockstar would come to refine this compelling formula.
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When the PS2 launched I eagerly awaited the series first 3D entry. There wasn’t massive hype for it at the time, not like anything it would later become, but when Rockstar launched GTA 3 on October 22, 2001 it changed the medium forever. While Edge magazine infamously gave it 6/10 and damned it with faint praise, as if they were sniffly unimpressed (Edge later claimed it was a “misprint” on the score, but we’re not letting them rewrite history), it would go on to have a lasting influence.
It soon became apparent to players just how much GTA 3 contained and how many ways it sought to push gaming forward. Arguably it was in the little details that enriched it. The fact you could shoot the moon. The newspapers saying Zombie Elvis had been found. The ‘COCKS’ shown on the stands of a stadium as you flew over it in the Dodo. Childish yes, but once upon a time GTA revelled in this “edgy” low humour.
Nowadays, Rockstar has transformed into something else entirely, seemingly trapped by its very
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