Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by another special guest this week. So Steve, do you want to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Steve Burns. I’m formerly a video games journalist to Grand The Title, I suppose. And now I own and run a production company which makes shows, commercials, documentaries, a lot of it in the video game space, but not all of it. Very exciting. So Steve’s here to talk about Grand Theft Auto 3 with us. On October 22nd, 2001, Grand Theft Auto 3 was released on PS2 in North America. I would follow four days later in Europe. It’s arguably the single most important game of the modern age and established a template of the now dominant open world genre. So 20 years later, this episode, we’re gonna talk all about the game, its legacy and how the GTA series would subsequently evolve from this first 3D entry in the series. So Steve, I’d love to hear a little bit about your career. So you’re the first person I’ve had on who I worked with at Imagine. What are your memories of working with me just to ambush you out of nowhere? It was good, it was good. I always thought that there was a lot of, and I’m not actually including myself in this one, I thought there was a lot of really good talent there at the time. And you know, you had guys like Matt Han Tran as well, yourself and just so many people knocking around there. And it was a weird time for games, but also an exciting one. And yeah, I’d come from a sort of, you know, development publishing testing background. So it was weird to come onto the other side as it were. But generally I thought, yeah, there’s a lot of great memories from that time. A lot of terrible ones as well, because making magazines is stupid and dumb and hard, especially when you have to fly back from LA and then go straight into the office because your PDF deadline is about 10 minutes after you land Heathrow. But no, it’s the good things you remember. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so you worked in QA a little bit before Games Media, like you say. What kind of stuff were you doing in that time? Because it struck me as quite interesting, the sort of things you got involved with. I got quite very lucky, in fact, and managed to wrangle a job out of Electronic Arts and was working there in the early days, 2007, the early days of PS3, really. It informed a lot of the way I approach some of my criticism or writing because, and this is probably more relevant than ever, now you see all of the decisions, good, bad, ugly, stupid, indifferent, that go into making the games that you’re waiting for. If I could go back, say, for example, to my university and do a talk about producing and making shows, I would say probably about 70% of all the shit that you love is a mistake or someone didn’t want to do it, or they panicked and put it in at the last moment. And the launch of the early PS3 days were very fraught. I think it’s pretty much well known that there were development issues with the hardware. So to see it from the inside and see the frustration from the people upstairs making the games, yeah, it was a real eye-opener, especially when you were also working on builds of the games for the Xbox 360, which was comparatively a total dream. Right, right, yeah. So what kind of games were you interested in growing up? What were the sort of things that got you interested in writing about games or working in games to begin with? I’ve talked about this before, is that I didn’t grow up in Britain. So games, they weren’t just entertainment, they were a commodity item because the life we were kind of living, working for the British, well, my dad has worked for the British Army, it was kind of transient because you didn’t know where you go. You might do a year there and then hey, you’re back off and get posted somewhere. And so I did learn how to make friends with people quite quickly. And as a kid, you can’t just go to the park. So there are two things, you can play football or you can find out who’s got the video games. And so what you end up doing is just borrowing any video game that you can get your hands on because there’s no rental stores, there’s nothing. There’s certain games that you can get from German censorship. So I just borrow any, I play any old shit just to play it. But mainly, I’d say that the key influences on my life and career, stuff like Resident Evil, I love PES. Well, loved it until that debacle the other day. And I liked games which had an adventure element to them, but weren’t necessarily high fancy. So I was never really into Zelda, even though I kind of appreciated why people loved it. So I loved stuff like Clock Tower, something that felt quite filmic in a way, even though it’s very rudimentary, something that felt like it was directed. That’s why Resident Evil works. So this long and rambling answer is, I played everything I could get my hands on because I never knew when I would be able to do it. And I love shooting zombies with really corny dialogue. So after we worked together at Imagine, you moved on to working for Video Gamer. I remember when I bumped into you at a subsequent event, you said, oh, we just bought Pool Table and you made it sound like the best thing in the world. What was working for Video Gamer like after working at Imagine? I had to learn a lot of new things very quickly. And I thought that I was very lucky. I think the story of a lot of my career and actually everyone’s career, really, is you can have all the so-called talent in the world or if you don’t have an opportunity, just fuck, right? So I got lucky in one way. I got an email from Video Gamer saying, we’d like to see you to interview you about position here. And I was like, okay. So went along, liked everything they were saying. No guarantee I’d get it, but got it. And yeah, I think that we were given a lot of latitude to experiment, is the polite way of putting it, I believe. But no, the guys there, the brass there, they took chances on us. But they were also good at what they did. And so I needed a little bit of babying through it, as you can probably imagine. I didn’t do… I still basically did the things that I was kind of doing on the print side, so more feature sort of things. So I didn’t have to get into what still terrifies me, which is news. I see people doing the new stuff, and they’re like, you’re a genius, I’ve got no idea, you know, about this sort of thing. I remember going to Gamescom one year, and yeah, I was sitting next to someone, and they were the professional news editor for a site that escapes me. And it was just night and day. Yeah, the way that they work. So I learned a lot from our guys as well on that one, I had to go out. But no, it was fun, and I believe that having these different experiences is the key to not just becoming totally stale. If I can say that, do you know what I mean? You have to go with what’s new or what’s coming up or whatever some algorithm is telling you, otherwise you don’t eat that month. So yeah, it’s fun. I feel like your type of writing, your style of writing, was quite influential on UK games media. I feel like I saw people inspired by how you did things. Did you feel that at all? Did you feel like your influence kind of stretched out a little bit? And do you feel like you haven’t quite got the right outlet for your type of writing? I don’t believe it’s influential per se, or even at all really. It’s a very British style of games writing. I was just a person who was doing a version of it. You could go back, and I’m not comparing myself to him, obviously, but, you know, Brooker was a bit like that. A lot of PC Zone, Amiga Power, CVG, and all of that. So it was the right outlet. They let us do some… I look back on some of the stuff we did, and I just think… I think that’s why it resonated with people. Maybe not even necessarily the writing, but just it seemed so anarchic. And it was. There was a moment where I got a bollocking because I’d misjudged a wall, and Miller would throw me into it, and I nearly went through it. So it was like an interior stud wall or whatever you’d say. And the EMD comes out like, why is there a massive hole in the wall? Well, we were making a wrestling show. It was like, right, okay, shut the fuck up. But no, it was the right outlet. And yeah, if people liked it, that’s fine. I think there was… Maybe what people liked was that at that time in my life, I had come off the… When I joined video game, I would come off the back of some very bad family issues. And I just didn’t give a shit really about some of the thing. You know, the volume gets turned down on certain things that you worry about, and then you want to make your case. And sometimes we did actually go a bit too far. There are a couple of things that I thought, in our quest to make people laugh and be different, that we’ve gone too far there. But yeah, maybe people just liked that we were so different because I knew what I wanted to do and I was going to do it. So maybe that’s it. Yeah, the Order 1886 score turning upside down, that felt like a pure Steve Burns move to me. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but it seemed like you to me. That’s the one that if I could go back, I wouldn’t do it again. Because it felt at the time, and I can’t really go into too much detail, at the time there was frustration about certain elements of review processes or something. And not for the publisher, just in general. It felt like we were a bit on a carousel, round and round, the same old things. And I think that so many people were hyping the game, not in the development team or in the publishing team, but in the wider community. And there had all been so much pushback, blowback on. We’d review something and then people would be like, oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s like, mate, you haven’t played this game. And then so I think that that’s where it’s from. However, afterwards, looking back on it, I would say it was unnecessary, even though we knew the point it was trying to make. I’m not sure that a lot of people did. And so, yeah, yeah. And so it felt unnecessary, so punitive basically. And again, as I was saying, I’d been on the development side and I would have gone fucking mad if I’d have seen that and thought it was directed at me or us or, you know, the editorial week. So that’s the one I would change. But on the whole, I think we did our best to entertain people and try something different and try and follow in that sort of British style. And I think, like, we never considered it to be influential, so much so that we were in LA once and this guy came over to us in downtown and he kind of stopped me. And he said, stopped us, but he was speaking to me, and he said, hey guys, can I get a photo with you? And I don’t, and I just, I don’t know why I said it. I just, in my mind, I was like, there’s a stranger asking for her. And I just went, why? Which obviously, given the persona, must have come across his in-universe dickhead. And then I looked down and I saw his lanyard and I was like, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I just thought you were around and you were gone from LA. What if I thought we were someone else? So it seemed to have influenced certain people and if people liked it, that’s fine. But yeah, I would change the order, that’s for sure. Yeah, fair enough. So recently, Steve, obviously, your company Special Gun works with different publishers and other companies making video around video games. What’s that side of things like for you? There’s been some amazing opportunities and projects and again, we’ve been lucky. But I hope to say we’ve also been good when we’ve been asked. So we remade the George Romero Resident Evil 2 live action trailer, which was a dream of mine when I was again living abroad. I mean, in those days, YouTube didn’t exist, obviously. And the only time you would see anything would be in a grainy, low resolution screenshot that someone had nabbed off of one of the very rudimentary lighting capture kits in a magazine. So to be able to produce a remake of that was exciting and terrifying because now you’re like, oh, right, let’s not fuck it up then, hopefully. We went with Disney on some Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back stuff. We had an amazing time in Japan, in Osaka, where we went on to the development floor at Capcom’s HQ. And I believe that that’s not a thing that’s done. So again, we were very grateful to have been asked, which was amazing. The dev floors to me are so interesting because of what’s on people’s desks just as much as what’s on their screens. And I think you can learn obviously a lot from what books people have got, their animators or, you know, not just knickknacks or games, just their references. And I think you can actually learn more about them for documentary stuff or infer and then confirm by talking, by seeing what’s on the desk rather than asking them because most people are very well media trained. And you’re working with them, so you’re not going to stitch them up or anything. But yeah, that’s good. And we just finished season one of Top Gear Gaming Show, the official one for the BBC. Again, that was, it was very nice to be asked and to do it, but it also comes with a certain amount of pressure. You know, you have that moment in anything where you go, they’re like, shit, we’ve been, okay, well, obviously we’re going to do it. And then you sign the deal and you go, fuck man, we can’t blow it. Because, you know, so there’s that pressure, but no, it’s been fun. And again, it’s different. Yeah, there’s so much good stuff to be done in and around that world. And that’s why I think there’s been a mini boom for stuff like Noclip and people make games and a lot of stuff like that, because it’s all storytelling at the end of the day. And people, video games to me have been mystified for a bit too long. I knew this when I was one of the publishers. Game Show is coming in now. Basically like the equivalent of Draw the Curtains around here. I get it because, you know, the technology element of it is important and secret. But it feels like a lot of the places we get to with players, and even with publishers and journalists and developers, we don’t really understand how this stuff gets made. So seeing that in this new job is very interesting. Yeah, it’s interesting that the video stuff you’re doing now, because I did a couple of years producing the Xbox YouTube channel, which is nowhere near the same scale, but is closer in tone and sort of output, I’d say, to what you guys do in terms of working with clients and stuff. And I must admit, I personally don’t think I have the chops for that work in terms of the stress of delivering stuff where there are so many other people outside of your unit involved. That’s the thing that got me. On a magazine, you can only waste each other’s time. You have a set amount of time to make the magazine and whatever happens is sort of private and in that office. But running a film shoot, and I’ve only done tiny ones, but even we’ve got a big interview with someone and we’ve only got half an hour, the pressure of producing, it takes a certain character to be able to pull that stuff off. So mega kudos for that. Well, thank you, that character is a man screaming into a telephone generally and moving his death date up about 35 years. It is stressful because like any, especially when you’re doing something which has a name, a big brand attached to it, that comes with its own set of expectations naturally. So then you’re doing stuff like, okay, so we would like this host, and what does everyone think about that? And then can we get these guests? And suddenly you’re into the old cliche spinning plates, but all of the plates are essentially Faberge eggs. If you drop any one of them, you’re dead. So you have to be fairly outgoing. And actually, I think a lot of this is what I was saying when I was growing up is that I had to learn how to understand what people wanted or what they were like very quickly to integrate into new skills. Everyone knows what being the new kid in a school is. So I had about 10 schools. And so in one way or another, I can kind of understand where a lot of people are coming from and what they would like maybe. I’m not Don Draper, but just trying to think about, okay, so where did they win? What’s their win? And how do we actually compromise on me? How do they understand that everyone’s got to win? And that may be loggerheads with one another. But yeah, it is stressful, but it’s fun. You know, weird, horrible way. I think it’s when you finish the shoot, so Top Gear was the logistics on it. When you get on set and you’ve got all of the lighting rig and you’ve got the hair and makeup, you’ve got the green room and you’ve got the fucking Ferrari Testa Ross that turns up and you’ve got a good blend, more importantly, more than the toys. You’ve got a good blend and you get to know, I mean, you guys would notice any project behind, this is good. Yeah, this is good. I could feel this is going somewhere. That’s the only, that’s the reason you do it, really. With anything we were doing that was substantial enough, I had a certain point where I thought, we’ve got enough now. After that, I didn’t really care. Or like, that’s all I needed to get to was like, we have enough to fundamentally do the thing we have to do. And just the relief when you hit enough is just our bliss. When we were dealing with the Ferrari stuff, it’s just… This was a bit, I mean, they’re rare anyway, or rare-ish, I suppose. But this was a right-hand drive version. So, and those are super rare. And you get to a point where, yeah, you’re fretting by… And especially, you got a lighting rig over this car, 200 grand. And also, you can’t just… Even if you had 200 grand and your insurance paid out, you can’t just find another one. So, you know, and you’ve got this massive lighting rig over the top of it, and the GAFA and the DOP, and they’re moving, you know, the lights, and you’re just looking at it thinking, I’m gonna die here. It’s like Ferris Bueller, you know, is a car just gonna go through it. Yeah, and you’re like, oh, but also you feel that about, more importantly, you say, obviously, about the people, because there’s a lot of pressure on them. So you’ve got to make sure that they’re comfortable, that they’re feeling good, that they’re not being, you know, feeling that they’re totally under the gun. And mainly, the most important thing, and this is my piece of advice, and this is Mills, it’s my business part, piece of advice, get a good caterer, because if people have a bad lunch, you will have a bad shoot. And that’s just the rule. Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. There you go, Matthew, if you ever go back into video, just, you know, more sandwiches. If only I had known, I was one lunch away from success. Good lunches, my friends. That is the key, trust me, you’ll be amazed. Okay, great stuff, Steve. Well, let’s take a short break then. We’ll come back and we’ll get into the GTA 3 side of things. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to talk a bit about GTA 3. Well, a lot about GTA 3. That’s the name of the episode, as you’ve seen if you downloaded this. So Steve, I brought you on, because I feel like you’re a great thinker about Rockstar Games. That’s certainly how I remember you from working with you. What’s your sort of history with Rockstar? Well, what I didn’t show that is, almost certainly, gigantically massively overblown. What I was saying about games that feel like they’re directed, or have a movie quality, shall we say. When I say movie quality, I don’t mean stuff like, FMV games of the past. Well, I mean games which take extremely deliberate framing decisions, to be a wank about it. And so, I think that’s what a lot of people love about GTA, even if they don’t necessarily know how to articulate it. And that’s not anyone’s fault. That’s just because they don’t spend all their time reading books about 70s Hollywood and shot setups and framing like dorks like me do. But they were obviously massively influenced by the things that influenced me and that I loved. And I found a lot of the design decisions, and at the time I was playing it, I didn’t really understand it, but a lot of the design decisions for three, it was so intelligent, but not necessarily in the way that the people thought, I’m sure we’ll get into that in a second. And I just as I dug deeper into the systems, you could see the way that they were laid, and you’d like, that’s why that works better than other open world games. And that’s maybe what that inspirational, what that’s why this is the king and not, say, true crime. A small bit about the making of GTA 3 then. DMA Design was purchased from Infogrames for 11 million in 1999 by Take-Two. They, that was a year after the publisher of the original GTA from PS1 BMG was acquired by the company. At the time, DMA was working on two games called GTA 3D and GTA Online Crime World. Obviously, only one game would come out of that. But influences on the game included Quake, Midtown Madness and movies like Casino Scarface, The Warriors and Goodfellas, which is self-evident when you’re playing the game. But IGN is my source for that, by the way. That’s Leslie Benzies, the producer of the game said that our main goal was to create a game where the player is free to do as they please, where it’s possible to interact with, and receive feedback from any entity within the world without the player being confused about their objectives. The number of options available to players made it hellish for testers on the game as you might imagine. Benzies was proud of how cohesive the world was. You’d hear ads on the radio, then see vans from the same companies driving around Liberty City. It was made primarily by 23 people, according to that same interview from February 2001. The thing that always blew my mind about this was, when you conceptually thought about the idea of 3D, a 3D GTA, from playing the 2D GTAs, I think everyone who played the 2D GTAs, which were a little bit out of time in that they were 2D top-down games, they were a little bit unusual for the time, was what would these look like in 3D? You saw stuff like Driver 2 where you were like, well, will it maybe resemble this? It comes along and just absolutely blows out your expectations. It’s just so complete as a package. It’s so much better than it should be in theory. To start with the 2D GTAs then, Steve, so these games were popular in the UK, but didn’t seem to break out in the US like the 3D games would. Why do you think that is? Is there something quintessentially British about the 2D GTAs that maybe doesn’t translate outside the UK? I think this actually applies to GTA 3 as well, but much bigger way. There’s the same, I think, broader point. As a British person or a British audience, playing GTA, the original, and maybe not GTA 2, it’s a bit more stylized and more retrofuturistic, but especially 3 was that you were exploring this amazing world, but you were also a stranger because there was a strong chance that you had never been to a version of, you know, you’ve not been to New York, or you maybe weren’t familiar with the strangeness of American, Americana. What I think was really important and why maybe the British market liked it more was because it felt like this weird odyssey. The radio stations to me, I think, are one of the keys to it. So, and I think that’s why the casting of Lazlo is inspired. So he saw your guide, your spirit animal, through this strange world, and you’re thinking what he’s thinking. So suddenly you’re on the same page. So both of you are navigating this strange and dangerous world. Yeah, for sure. Matthew, what was your history with GTA coming to GTA 3? Or what is your history with GTA generally? When do you get involved with the series? I guess it goes to your previous question as well about what the 2D GTAs were about and why they didn’t maybe take off. I remember this being on a school computer, of all things, like someone had somehow managed to install this. So I didn’t have it at home, but I remember playing it in school, in the IT room at lunchtime, and not really appreciating it that it was this big controversial thing or having a sense that it was going to be a big successful thing, the 2D games. I always thought they were a little kind of like abstract and odd. I don’t think anyone ever got particularly far with them because they were quite fiddly to play. I kind of grouped them in with things like Carmageddon, like just quite throw away nasty, sort of nasty, funny, slightly sort of exploitive things. You know, obviously I knew that GTA 3 was connected to those things, but just the promise of it and the promise sophistication of GTA 3 seemed to sever a lot of ties with it. Like I don’t see the through line at all, really, from those top down ones to the 3D one. I also lived it pretty vicariously through games magazines because I didn’t have a PS2. I didn’t have a PS2 until I bought a Slim at the end of its lifetime and kind of caught up with it. My brother got one a few years in, but we definitely didn’t have one when GTA was on the scene. Yeah, I just remember reading about it in Games Master and looking at the screens and it being one of two games where the impression was the mad men have done it. They’ve built the world. The other was Shenmue. To read about those and see pictures of them, not even footage of them, but just to piece together what those games are from static images, you just assume, oh yeah, that’s the whole world. You’ve done it, congrats. How exciting for people who get to play that. So I was always very envious from afar. That makes sense, being a GameCube owner as well, I suppose, where you missed out on it. So I suppose then, Steve, when you first started playing Grand Theft Auto III, I suppose this goes slightly before that. Do you remember reading about this in the press and being excited about it and seeing it as a big deal? The answer truthfully is no, because it felt like in those days, and I was a huge, and still am a huge fan of PSNT magazine, and that was my magazine, my go-to. There was one point where they issued an apology for writing more words about Jeremy Spake, star of Airport at the time, than they did about the original God of War in preview. It felt at that point that things could sneak up on you. I think the through line is that if I was to use a movie analog for it, it would be my call. The first ones are LA Takedown, and then the 3D ones are HIT. I don’t mean that in. They’re essentially a remake with the budget, but the core feeling of it remains, because the first one was fiddly, and it was difficult, and didn’t you have to press triangle to walk? But there was something there, but the thing there was the atmosphere and the tone, and you’re absolutely right, the promise. It had me thinking, what would GTA be like even at that age, if it was a bit like driver, or 3D like driver, they are extremely different, obviously. But then when it arrived, it just, to me, I may have just been ignorant, or maybe other magazines were covering it, but it wasn’t this huge, to me, it seemed this huge sequel, that everyone was like, right, this is the three quarters. It wasn’t a Zelda. It wasn’t Mario game. It didn’t seem like it was blanketed wall to wall. I remember PSN2’s review, so suddenly it had a rave. And again, as you said, fuck, they have done it and this looks… What? Right, I have to get it. I remember the Grand Theft Auto series up until that point had always been the kind of subject of like playground, kind of like, you know, have you heard about this game? Kind of discussion and it becoming this very coveted series of like, you know, quite mature games. And like you say, Matthew, like it’s a kind of like disposable nastiness to the 2D GTAs. But I certainly felt the kind of like wonder of driving around a city in those games and thinking about like, it is really cool that they’ve done this. Weirdly, I got that feeling more from the London one just because it felt more like a place I’ve been to, I guess, than the American based original or the more stylized GTA 2, like Steve says. But GTA 3, when that came along, it was like a brother of a friend who had got the game as soon as it came out and was like, this thing’s really fucking special. And I think that that was a very slowly building movement of people just being like, holy shit, this game is like nothing else. It would eventually go on sale 14.5 million copies. But I think you’re right, Steve, by the time Vice City comes around, it’s a serious commodity to the big games mags and it’s like the number one thing. But yeah, it maybe wasn’t there from day one. I reread Games Master’s review of GTA 3 just before recording this. And it’s like, I think it’s like a world first review, or that’s what the cover says. And it’s like four pages and they give it 91. And it’s almost like they don’t know what to do with it. The writer is trying to convey that you can kind of do anything in this world. And like the only solid example he has is you can steal like a fire engine when it comes to put out a fire and then drive it around as his example of like total freedom. And he doesn’t really talk about the story or the missions or anything like that. But it’s you can definitely sense this initial sort of struggle to sort of pass exactly like how big and important it is. Didn’t come out of nowhere, obviously, but it felt like it came out somewhere close. That combined with how it had the things that it did. So you’re saying about the writer with the systems and stuff like that. There’s such a good feeling in games, especially around about that time, where if you could use your ideation or imagination and think, what if I do this and then it works? You know, it’s the fucking tagline for Primer. What happens if it actually works? And then it does. And the game doesn’t punish you, it’s not predictive. In fact, the game rewards you. And that combined with it just sort of appearing in a lot of ways. The word of mouth, the playgrounds. I got my copy early from an indie. By this point, I read PSM2’s review and I was excited. So I got home and then the next day, a load of other kids had got it. There’s a mission, I believe, that’s called Turismo. And it’s not even that far into the game, but you’re a kid and you’ve only got a fine amount of time to play it or whatever. And I remember someone saying, oh, yeah, I’ve heard that when you when you finish the Turismo mission, you get a million dollars. And to spark an imagination that the game has the capacity to do that, to reward you with something like that, is where it is where it just blew people’s heads off, I think. And you said about the story that the story is actually is weirdly different to the later ones. It’s a revenge thriller. So it’s like payback, like Mel Gibson’s payback. Or, you know, it’s just, hey, you’ve been betrayed. You’re in the city, find the people who did it. You got to get up the chain. Whereas the later ones, stuff like midlife crisis is or being Tony Montana. I got GTA 3 Christmas 2001. I tricked my dad into getting me from Argos. I said, it isn’t that bad. It isn’t that violent. And I was 13 and he bought it for me. And my mum was not happy. But I regret nothing, of course. If the police want to arrest him, I’m happy to give up his details. Kind of a plea bargain thing, that’s fine. So weirdly, when I remember this game, the thing I remember most is the first island in the game, Portland, because it took me so fucking long to get off of this island, to progress far enough to get there, that I ended up driving around this one third of the map over and over again. And I think that the Mafia missions in this are the most memorable in the entire game, just because so many of the best characters are quite frontloaded in this game. You meet a lot of interesting people and then you’re kind of like slow rise to get revenge against Catalina who shoots you in the opening and you get arrested and all this stuff. And I think that in my, when I remember GTA 3, I just remember driving around these dingy streets of Portland in a cab or a shitty car, listening to head radio or listening to chat box and just like parking at the coast and looking over at Staunton Island, the second location and just like listening to the city sound. And the fact that I was absorbed enough to even think the city sound was atmospheric or that like it was worth like pausing and taking it in was just a kind of sign of the impact it had as a kind of like, you know, as a world to step into. Yeah, the thing you say, Steve, about playground rumours, so true with this game, because people at school would say, okay, there’s a plane in this game, right? But it doesn’t fly properly. But if you’re like a fucking magician, you can make this thing like actually fly. Or like you can snipe the moon and the moon will change size and and then going home and trying this stuff. Yeah, it was pure magic for that stuff. Yeah, so Steve, I was curious, what do you remember as the kind of like highlights of this, of that world and what the kind of details that come back to you when you remember it now? If I was to describe it in the terms of the movie terminology, and obviously it’s very influenced, to me, it feels like a night movie. When I think about Vice, I think about the day, obviously. When I think about this, I think about what you said, driving around at night, and you know, almost kind of taxi driver sort of thing, dingy, almost always raining in my memory, you know, metropolis of pain, right? What I liked about the talk radio was that it alluded to a world that you were in that you would never see, but you didn’t need to. So, you know, the fake commercials, all the commercials, you know, for, you know, for video games, or for, you know, for weed drugs, or for movies, or just just in general. There’s a story about Ridley Scott, who I believe when, was it, Hampton Fancher was writing Blade Runner, and they were going to the first draft, I believe. And Ridley had asked him, he said, You’ve made this amazing world, but it’s all interiors. It’s all kind of, you know, just like guys in rooms being, you know, moody and paraphrasing it. And he said, What’s outside the window? And then Ridley used all of his experience in commercials and stuff to do it. But it felt like in this game, you could see what was outside that window, even if you couldn’t touch it or feel it. You couldn’t go to the cinema and watch any of the fake movies. You couldn’t play any of the games. But the fact they were alluded to and then just had enough in-game stuff like, yeah, you see adverses, it was the trickery of it. And I mean that in the best possible way. One of my big memories of this game is the fact that I always wanted to be inside. I always wanted to go inside. And correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t remember there being any interior missions in this one, but they did add some in Vice City. And that seemed like a huge leap at the time. You’re like, wow, I get to go in the houses. Because this, you know, my memory of this game is a lot of people like exiting doors from insides to come out and tell you interesting things. And then they go back inside and you never really got in there. But you’re right, like the radio and things like that definitely sell you on what’s happening inside. It gives it a life beyond. It’s quite a grim place, the outside. The other tiny detail I always remember about this is that sort of visual effects filter of like windblown trash and paper that’s like everywhere in this game. This game, this is like a dirty, dirty place. And that like a tiny attention to detail has obviously become like one of the defining things of of like, you know, what Rockstar really valued. But it’s weird how something like that can kind of stick with you, just the look and texture of its trash is so specific. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, for sure. I think that there’s like sort of macro level stuff that blows you away. And, you know, basically on every level, they thought about how to make this world, this world seem kind of real or amazing. But the first thing it did that really dazzled me was there is a point in the game where I believe that the Mafia go to war with the Triads. And you see all of the Mafia NPCs and all of the Triad NPCs just fighting each other in the in the streets of Liberty City. And only it lasts for a few levels. But I remember the idea that the world state had changed seemed amazing to me and there were just like set pieces popping off in different parts of the world. That seemed like absolute magic. Do you remember that, Steve? Yes, I do. Just once in my mind, sorry, Tristan, to Matthew’s part about the interiors. I don’t know how many assassinated or wrong. I think the closest we got to an interior was the chap in Central Park who would give you the missions out of the public toilets. You know, you would go under and in, and in all the sequels that was the thing, that was the big ask, wasn’t it? But to see the world, to see it change like that, I mean, of course it’s video games, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, there’s smoke and mirrors at every single art form or whatever. But suddenly, you’d gone from being in a game where you could point this car and go seemingly in any direction. But after a while, you know, the missions are what’s going to keep you there, because the shooting had yet to be refined, shall we say, and there wasn’t that much mission variety. But to then change it without, you know, not just having a day night cycle, which is important, but it was about going, the things, the story that you now drive here is driving an effect, like a visual effect on this world, that not only can you see, you can get out and be killed by this. And it’s visceral, to use the phrase, which we will return, we will love. I think that the interesting thing about the mission design is that this game is kind of like, is rife with the difficulty spikes and like the entire series would be. But yeah, I think that that meant it took me a long time to get into the next part of the world. There is the only other interior I remember is there is an Internet Cafe on Staunton Island. Where if you shoot out the glass, you can go in there. So you can go in there. There’s your interior. But I remember thinking the same thing. And then you go into the hotel to save and it’s like, oh, yeah, holy shit. Yeah, so I was curious if, Steve, you had any specific moments from the game that you kind of remember or like anything in the story where you were like, oh, shit, I didn’t expect them to do that or anything along those lines. It’s less about the story itself as in the plot. I would say what I liked about it and what I continue to like about the plots in a lot of GTA games is I like it when the and this is how the generally usually progress. You know, you have your low level gangsters, mafioso, whatever you want to call them, but then as the leaves of power start getting thrown or smashed or whatever, suddenly you’re speaking with people who have an interest in a way that interests me, which is basically the corruption of 20th century America. And so the guys who I like in the series of people is Mike Torino, James Woods’ corrupt officer. Even the guy gives you the missions in the bathroom. The guy was from the paper company from 4. What you were now in was something where the actual powers that be had an interest. And now there was a commentary no matter how basic it may have seemed at the time. So they got a lot better, more involved, should I say. That this world was now way bigger than you, but you were somehow the protagonist of reality. So now you’ve got these meetings with these guys who are just clearly way above your pay grade. And so that’s less about the plot, but more about how it builds and builds and then just keeps on chucking stuff in and says, OK, you know, like the corrupt DEA or FBI or, you know, the corrupt alphabet officers, shall we say. You know, that’s a staple. One other thing is that I loved the character. Is it Donald Love? You know, the media impresario who who owns the appears to own to my mind. He actually owns the city because he owns the conduit to which you experience the world, which is the radio. Yeah. And so he had that voice, you know, kind of the baritone or whatever. Karma Glocken. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And again, there’s kind of unseen like force, which there’s a couple of missions about, you know, his tower and all of that. I believe there’s actually a really difficult, difficult spike sort of around that point, that point in the game. But that to me is what stands out. And also the guy on Chatterbox who says guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I only use my machine gun and the safety of my own home or car. And it’s just the car line at the end does me every time. Because I don’t I know why, because it’s and so do you remember when we were in discussions about some of this before? And I played you 107.7 The Bone, that San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah, and the adverts and the callers is insane. It’s just totally insane. Yeah, it was like one of those insurance ads where it’s like you can get therapy from home, but it’ll only cost you like $9,000 and like one of your toes. Yeah, that is that to me is what what stuck out. And like, I mean, I think I’m quite a few years older than you. So it’s more of a case of, I don’t know, like I was the stuff that I really liked about not saying, you know, you’ll take on a juvenile or anything. I was I was now being I could just go, you’re saying about your dad having to buy food and everything because you were 13, you know. So I’m, you know, a few years older than you. So I can just then go and rent certain movies that they’re referencing. And suddenly I’m thinking about it like, oh, that’s where that’s from. That’s where that from. So I think that’s that drove a lot of the way I felt about it. Just being that little bit older, four or five years, maybe it just it just tweaked my experience. I think, Matthew, what about you coming to this game like a little bit later than as someone who bought PS2? We rented a PlayStation 2 and the game so I could play it for one weekend. The only time this ever happened before was when I rented a PlayStation to play one weekend of Final Fantasy 7 without a memory card. So it was like when you die, you’re dead. You want to try speed running the first disc of Final Fantasy 7 over a weekend? That’s fun. Fuck you, that demonic house. Yeah, so I’m getting a chance to play it and to be honest, my first reaction was because I had this image of it built up in my head from reading Games Master, like I said, and I was just sort of annoyed at how fiddly a lot of it was, because the promise of you can do anything you want in this city, and it’s like, well, you can do anything if you can execute it with these particular controls they’ve given you. And I was just really bad at it. Like, my lasting memory of that first weekend was dinging my car loads and having to take it to the pay-and-spray because I had to deliver a car and I was always damaging the car that I had to deliver. And so like quite a mundane first impression of this world. They definitely got a bit more relaxed as they went on and they do loads of stuff as the series develops to kind of ease off the difficulty. But back then it felt particularly punishing and maybe a bit more sort of video gamey in some of those ideas and systems. Yeah, in terms of missions, I must admit, a lot of this game kind of blurs into just the experience of being in the city. Like, if you were to ask me, like I wouldn’t have said, oh, this game had any celebrity voice acting in it. But actually, looking into it for the episode, I’m like, oh, actually, it’s got quite a lot. Like in my head, all that started in Vice City and this didn’t really have any story. But that’s just not right. You know, that is I don’t know where I got the idea from. Yeah, I think it’s the lack of a voice protagonist that probably drives a bit of that. Because obviously, when Tommy Vercetti adds a very different dynamic to the game, he’s like, you know, he is a force in the cutscenes. Whereas you are just a guy who has told stuff and then you get on with it, which I think has a bit of power in itself. I remember the I actually do remember the story. I think it’s because I have a stronger relationship with this game than I do with Vercetti or San Andreas, which I think makes me a bit unusual in how people experience the series. But I remember like one of the first moments that really blew me away is after you’ve done a long string of missions for Salvatore, the mafia boss, he sends you to pick up a car and along the way, you get like a pager message. And if you don’t read the message properly and you get in the car, it explodes. And it turns out that Salvatore was pushing you out of the picture because he thought you’d betrayed him. And I did do that the first time I played it. And like only the second time, it’s like, oh, shit, the message says the car is rigged with a bomb. Don’t drive. Don’t go there. Come over to where we are right now. And then that leads you to the second island. So that unlocks the next bit where you get in a boat and you’re suddenly working with the Yakuza and you’re suddenly against the people you’ve been working for the whole time. And I thought that was amazing. Steve, do you remember that bit as well? Again, and that was something which said, hey, actions have consequences as well. And this is why I think it kept things fresh. So you then got to the second island, but you were essentially kind of back towards, not the start, but kind of beginning of the middle. Because now you were still a stranger and you got that safe house and all that. But now there was a new bunch of dynamics to learn, new places to learn where to drive to, how to drive, how to react. And to that part of the world. And I think that, yeah, that’s a really strong way of doing it, which they started to experiment later on with the map being open from the start or not. And then maybe going back and forward as it were. But it was really powerful, I would say. Yeah, I think the gated world has a more powerful effect in this one because you have never seen a 3D world like this before. I think it’s more frustrating when you get to later games just because you know what a GTA world looks like, fundamentally. But in this, because you just have no idea what is waiting for you on the next island other than what you can see from the skyline from across Portland. That is euphoric to go to a new place. It was just because you’ve never seen a world like it before. I think that was really important. Bombed Abyss, I definitely remember, is a key moment. You’re sniping the different dudes while 8 Ball blows up. That’s a proper good end of first act. It was usually, go here, shoot these dudes, come back. Then this one was, go here, plan it. Obviously, this reached its total apex. Ball online and it’s heists and that feeling of making, obviously, you made a lot more decisions there. But the general concept is the same. We’re executing something and we’re making a decision on how I approach it, rather than just bust in and kill all these guys. You are still doing that. But now you’re thinking, okay, well, I’ve done this first part of this mission, so what’s the best way so I don’t fuck all that up as well? And I think to Matthew’s point as well about the controls is that, remember, you get the AR-15 towards the end of the game, or towards the middle end of Act 2, shall we say, and that had a first-person view mode. So rather than the lock-on system, which was very fuzzy, now you could almost free it, and it just changed everything. And that’s why I remember the PC versions being so well received because now you had mouse and keyboard control. It was totally free and open in a lot of ways. So it improved the playing experience, the action immensely. Another weird thing with this game that I’ve seen a few people make this case in various video essays and write-ups over the years is that the slightly more hands-off approach or the simplicity of the missions, the fact that they maybe are a bit more sandbox-y than the kind of cinematic drive that Rockstar gets hooked on and that becomes a much bigger part of the picture as they work towards modern day, where you literally end up with these incredibly choreographed cinematic missions in Red Dead Redemption 2. But some people have a fondness for GTA III in terms of they see it as a bit more experimental and sandbox-y. You know, you’re given a mission objective and you can kind of achieve it any way you want within the rules of the game. Almost, I’ve seen a couple of people say like it’s almost a little bit immersive, Simmy, you know, in that you can like set situations up by like parking vehicles to block off escape routes and then assassinate people that way or you can just try and run them over. I didn’t have that deeper relationship with this game to test that stuff out, but it definitely, it gives you like a lot more leash to kind of try what you want, you know, and that leash, I think, gets shorter with each passing game. I think that the ability to play it, to play later games like what you’re saying, is still there, but it’s not as optimal. In fact, it’s suboptimal in a lot of ways. So I used to do all that shit, and also the missions were difficult, so you had to get creative. You know, you’d have to go, well, I know where, I know that this van turns this corner on its script every time. So I’ll get my van and I’ll stick it there, and hopefully the game won’t eat it when I look away. And it was very good at that as well. Okay, there was the bug with your garage, and there was sometimes, you know, you get a car and look behind you, and it just, the game had deleted it or whatever. But I mean, you know, we’re not too far away from games like, was it, Boiling Point, Road to Hell, on PC, where, as I was told in one of the very damaging reviews for it, that you spent all this time trying to save the money to buy your car that you needed. I mean, you’d laugh about it now, but I imagine I would smash my entire wife up if that had been the case, but… But you could, yeah, I know, I think you’re right, but now the shooting is better, the aiming is better, the options available are better, and there are not more funnels, maybe, but more optimal is the way of doing it, especially with the GTA V characters’ abilities. So basically, the game is saying, you’re in a gunfight, this is your man. Rather than, okay, so now I’ve got to think, well, I keep on dying, so if I can get this car here at this time, no, this is in Vice City, sorry, but it’s the Sabre Turbo, and you have to, you race the guy to win the car towards the end of Vice City. And I just couldn’t beat him, and it was a bit of a choke point, people were like, no, this is too difficult, and you can just patch it there, and that was that. Get good. So what I thought was, you know what, I’m just going to do it, and you’re going to keep beating me, and then I’m going to do it until I find out where that last turn is, because the guy wasn’t going to punish me for not hitting any checkpoints, because the fail state is he beats you. So I found out where the finish line was, pulled the car up, got a sniper rifle and shot him dead. So he falls out the car, I get in my car, drive around and go through. You’ve won! Because you don’t need him anymore. He’s just a conjurer. But I actually think in later versions of the game, that’s patched out. That’s interesting. And the difficulty dialed a little bit down. The later games would introduce quality of life, shall we say, improvements, which enabled you to get through it without having to immerse yourself in it. I think that there’s a real push and pull with it in this game where it would get really techy about something like, oh, you dinged this car and you need to go take it to the paint and spray. But at the same time, I remember a race in this game on Staunton Island. It starts near the stadium and I couldn’t do it. So I thought, what would happen if I blew up all four cars on the starting line, then just had a leisurely drive to the finish? And it did work in the game. Let me finish that mission. I do like that because I think that you could argue that’s almost more of a Metal Gear Solid V style open world design choice, where it’s like, this is the objective, but what you do in between doesn’t matter as long as you fulfill the parameters of the objective. And it’s true that later Rockstar games get a bit texture about, oh, you fight with this character or you lost the trail for this and stuff. This game could have that too, but I almost wanted that more from the future of GTA. This was obviously such a tremendously ambitious undertaking. And in a way, it’s very, this may sound too grandiose, it’s like the line when in the Matrix where morph yourselves near, some rules can be bent and others broken. And again, imagine what was going on under the hood for this. And so it felt like with this game, if you could understand how it works, you could get around it. And that also, I believe, fed into the, because what you would choose was violence, because that is your currency in the game. And it still felt in-universe, so what most people would call safe scumming or scumming the game, or cheating it or exploiting it, just felt in-universe. Oh yeah, I got beaten by this guy in this race, I’m going to fucking kill him. Cool, you get the car, okay. Those are the odds, bye. As a spectator in the crowd, I would not be impressed if I went to see four people race and three of them blew up on the starting line, and then the last person pootled to victory. I think that would be a… Oh, you would, that’s, no you would, that’s all that thing where, you know, where sports contests say, we don’t want to see things like these brawls. Yeah, I do. Maybe not like morally or ethically, people getting exploded might seem bad. But at the start it would be, it would be cool. You’d be like, fuck man, I’m going to be on YouTube. How much of what we consider important about future GTA games is in this one? So Steve, we talked a little bit about this beforehand, because Vice City, I think, is seen as like, you know, it just obscures the memory of GTA 3 to a large extent. But I think that we were talking about how, like, all of the music from Scarface is in this game, for example, on Flashback FM. And, you know, as Matthew mentions, there are celebrity voice actors in this game that maybe people don’t remember. So how much of what is important to GTA up until now is in this game, do you think? The main thing is that it knew where it wanted to be set. The original True Crime series of Los Angeles, their big selling point was, now we’ve mapped all of LA. It’s like, yeah, LA’s really… I love LA. LA’s really dull and boring and shit to get around in a lot of places. There are two words which people think are interchangeable, but I don’t think they are. It’s realism and authenticity. Now, GTA 3 is not realistic. What it is is what feels like is authentic to being a monster in a version of New York. And that’s what they did best then and best now, is that they give you a world that feels like the way it would feel to get around it. Like no one wants to drive on the freeway in Los Angeles. No one. But everything in GTA 5 feels in its proper place. And the distances between districts and boroughs and that. And GTA 3 did that really well. And yeah, the stuff about the islands as well is such a great thing because, as you say, it gives you the sense of wonder that what is over there. And later GTAs would have it. So GTA 5 just, OK, well, because they still have the fog of war on the map, right? OK, so what is up there? And what if I go up this mountain? And invariably there’ll be something there. And other open world games just had a bunch of nothing, but it was very realistic. And I think that’s the key. And it kind of sets the template for, you know, the entire genre really where going to a new area elicits that feeling. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a little bit of that in Ocarina of Time as well. But here it’s obviously the fact that it’s all, it’s all in one place. It’s all one big location and a real feeling location as well. Matthew, what about you? Do you think that a lot of what is important about future GTA games is in this from the start? The strange thing is how many of their idiosyncratic control and gameplay decisions are established here. And you would think that someone having a first swing at it, the fact that you have to tap to sprint and that continues forever for the next 20 years, despite being incredibly irritating and no one else doing it. It’s just a thing they decided to do and is it because this game is such a smash that they won’t deviate from certain things? Is it just pride? Is it stubbornness? It’s very hard to know where some of it comes from. I was rewatching a few hours of this just before recording this. It made me laugh at just how established the kind of cutscene mission template is in terms of you turning up and some big, like, loudmouth caricature comes out and just barks, like, a few lines at you telling you to go and do something. And those kind of characters, they are definitively rockstar characters. The first mission you get in this game, I think it’s voiced by Joe Pantelliniow, whatever his name is. Yeah, I think Luigi is the character, right? The first guy you meet? He literally, a door opens, he comes out and he tells you to go and, like, steal a car or go and collect one of his sex workers or something. And it’s just, like, a man popping out of the door telling you to do something with a bit of colour and then he goes back in the door. And, like, that is basically rockstar for 20 years. Like, even in Red Dead 2, which is so sophisticated in so many ways, it’s still a man coming out of the door with a funny voice and, like, enlarged gesturing arms. You know, comes out and tells you to, you know, drive across a map to pick up a barrel or something. You know, it made me laugh at, like, how much hasn’t changed. And, you know, maybe it’s just, hey, if it works, it works. It’s interesting, you earlier on, you mentioned about the difference with the silent protagonist and that thing about the Rockstar characters. Like, you know, in GTA 3, you could argue this idea of having these big loud mouths makes perfect sense when you haven’t got a voice protagonist. You need something to kind of register. And does that set in motion like the tone of all Rockstar characters? Or is it literally just the sort of satirical caricature element? And then it makes more sense to have a quiet protagonist because you don’t, you know, if they haven’t quite got a grip on what that character is or how to balance that character against those voices, you know, I don’t know what came first or what the decision was there, but that voice, even though I said earlier, you know, I thought it began in Vice City here, you can see it already. And you’re like, oh shit, like they really knew what they wanted to do, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think of that, Steve? Yeah, I agree. I think there’s, I think oddly as well that as the game’s graphics, as the series graphics or visual brutality, should we say, got better, some of the, some of the more exaggerated stuff, it started feeling not incongruous, but suddenly was a bit of dissonance, I would say. So you’re driving down photorealistic Los Angeles and then you’ve got the still very quite over the top. I don’t know if like it felt to me, even that GTA V is definitely, I reckon, survived in top two of all time. But this, that sort of thing didn’t change, but the rest of the world changed. You know, it might just be they’re like, well, the GTA project, as we see it, is, you know, is a satire on America. And, you know, no offense to American listeners, they’re just saying, this is what Americans are all like, you know. They are like this. They are big. They are brash. You know, and maybe that’s fine. But I think you could play me a clip of NPC dialogue from many different games, and I’d be able to pick out a Rockstar character from a mile off. They just have a certain, a certain tone and sort of manic energy to them. Yeah. Yeah. I think getting across the feeling of America, I went to the States with my girlfriend. You get there and you turn on the telly and there’s an advert for, in the middle of the day, the tactical sunglasses. And most of the speech is run up 14 times. Human capability and small break, which basically says, you will fucking die if you put these sunglasses on. I think it’s difficult to kind of get away from that, especially as, you know, it is a global market. And okay, so the Americans probably thinking, yeah, but then a lot of Americans think the same about that as well. So, yeah, I can see why that sort of caricature, as you say, just remains. But yeah, if you want to know what the reality is, as ever, 107.7 The Bone, San Francisco, Google it, listen to it on internet radio. You won’t believe the adverts. They’re just, oh, they’re the greatest and in the worst possible way. I want to dig into that a little bit further because, so GTA is kind of like jokes and satire. As time goes on, people get a bit tired of it. And I always wonder if there’s a bit of like a self-conscious element to, oh, well, we always have to do satire. But here, because it’s the first time any of this has been done, it feels so fresh and it just kind of hits you out of nowhere. And I wonder if there is a particular outsider’s perspective on it because it’s not like America can’t make fun of itself. Of course it can. Loads of sophisticated comedy writers and performers do that all the time. But there’s something very specific about how American culture is taken down in that way that feels like an outsider’s perspective to me. Do you think that is because it’s a British developer making it, Steve? I would say so, definitely. The thing that the Brits are amazingly good at is essentially taking the piss out of themselves, which means they have no truck, really, with taking the piss out of everyone else. And obviously that can be damaging in a lot of ways. I’m not necessarily saying it’s in these games, but when I came back to Britain, I had already essentially done all of my, well, not all of my, but a lot of my, the development and part of my brain was from somewhere else. So I come back, which is extensively home, and it’s just a weird place because it’s not yours, right? And so every little thing that suddenly goes against those little cultural walls, especially when they’re now amplified through $35 billion, you know, is going to be played up in that way. Yeah, I remember I went into a hard rock cafe in LA, for reasons never really explained or justified, I suppose, and there was this almost Larry David style back and forth, where I had said, can I get a serviette? And the server did not know what a serviette was. And but to me, and this was actually on me, not her, to me, from where I’m from, you’re thinking, how on earth? But then someone just interjected going, he means a napkin. And I think that kind of, you know, they’re two cultures which have the same shared language, but with key cultural differences. I think those two rubbing up against each other is always going to be funny. The weird thing with Rockstar, though, for all this sort of satirizing of the American dream or America or whatever you want to call it, they’re also totally in love with the culture. Maybe like maybe that doesn’t come out as much in 3. Obviously Vice City is a love letter to a very particular era of film and TV. And San Andreas definitely leans big into the sort of LA films of the late 90s. Maybe it’s just my hazy memory, but I don’t remember 3 having as clear an identity in that sense. Beyond maybe like, here’s some Mafia. So it’s kind of like the best hits of, you know, Mafia films. Personally, I think that I think like you say, there’s a very specific pop culture reference point they’re using for the other two PS2 GTA games. Whereas here, like you say, you can link it to Goodfellas or The Godfather. But, you know, it’s not that’s only one third of the game. There’s a whole bunch of other characters that you’re dealing with the rest of the game who are also characters. I always felt like it was their intent was to let the city do the talking and to let the city be the big character. Like I say, maybe it’s linked to the, you know, having a protagonist who doesn’t talk. But once you finish this game and, you know, I played this game loads after I finished it. There are no more missions to do. There are no more mission markers. All you do is drive around, steal cars, hang out and enjoy the atmosphere of the place. And I almost think that maybe I think you got maybe a point that they thought that perhaps like to take it to the next level, you need that extra layer of, you know, character to the place. But it felt to me they thought, well, you know, this is the first time this has been done. So in some ways, the place does the talking for you. There’s maybe I’m reaching there. I think that to a lot of people, I mean, obviously we got the at the time of recording this, they’ve announced the GTA Definitive Edition and it’s going to feature various upgrades on the original games. To me, it feels like the beating heart of GTA on PS2 is considered Vice City or San Andreas by many players. To what extent do you think that these games overwrite GTA 3 in people’s memories? What do you think, when people reflect on the PS2 GTAs, GTA 3, is that naturally what people think of or do the other games dominate a little bit? Speaking from personal experience, they definitely dominate. I mean, they obviously do so much important heavy lifting with this one. You know, in the old importance versus quality stakes, GTA 3 is arguably the most important of all of them. Either the setting of Vice City is just so much more kind of iconic feeling to me that it overwrites it, or just the sheer kind of scale ambition of San Andreas. GTA 3 looks quite threadbare in comparison. If you don’t necessarily have that big nostalgic connection with it that you clearly had, for example, just from doing this podcast, this feels like a game that means more to you, Sam, than it does to me. You know, I am definitely a more casual relationship with 3, and then that was easily overwritten by the next two. I feel like Rockstar are a little bit like, here’s the next big thing, and this is what we’re all about. Obviously, they’re returning and re-releasing these things, but each game so completely wipes the floor in ambition with the one before it, it seems. It’s almost by design now that they replace what came before. I think there’s other stuff that does the heavy lifting in the other games, like you mentioned the music. I mean, people tie, obviously, Billy Jean to the opening moments of Vice City. That’s such a statement of intent about how things have escalated. So yeah, I completely understand why people’s relationship with GTA is heightened by those later games. Obviously, this comes first. It inspires a lot of different clones, and right up to the present day, really, Saints Row is still going as a series. I was curious, let’s start with you, Matthew. Do you think there are any good GTA clones or were they all shit? And as someone who had a GameCube, what was it like to see only the shit ones happen on your console? Yeah, it is bad because it’s always years of reading NGC where it’s like, move over GTA, it’s true crime. And until it comes out, you want it to be true, you’re desperate for it to be true, so you’re happy to go with it, and then it gets like the inevitable 65. I can’t say there’s many that I’m like, sort of hugely fond of. I guess some of the sort of superhero spin-offs at the time, like your Spider-Man 2 on GameCube was about as good as it got, which had a bit of that vibe. I mean, it’s a very different game, you know, you collect a lot more balloons that kids have let go of and things like that than you do in GTA. But in terms of like, oh, here’s a city, this is really cool. I mean, the fantasy it’s selling you on is very different. What I think is more interesting is that in Saints Row, confusingly in the podcast timeline, we’ve had a conversation which has yet to play out. It’s going to be in several episodes of time, you’ll hear us talking about a Saints Row game, where we were talking about its relation to GTA and whether the thing it does right is tapping into these early fun GTAs rather than kind of modern serious GTA. Is Saints Row particularly like 3 and 4, maybe more of an heir to these earlier GTA games than GTA itself, but you’ll have to look forward to that in a future episode. Yeah, I mean, there’s none that I’m hugely attached to. I just think doing them at the scale and pulling them off, you know, to the quality that you need to do is really only achievable when you’re working at a success and scale and level of financial might that Rockstar are, you know, it’s almost like don’t bother otherwise, which is kind of sad but true. Yeah. What do you think, Steve, were there any GTA clones, like, you know, either at the time or in subsequent years that you think, you know, nailed it or had their own kind of like angle that was valuable in itself? I think that a lot of them were heading down the wrong path of going right. Ours has to be bigger. And as I said about the realism, authenticity, whatever bullshit you want to call it. But then there was stuff like in True Crime Streaks of LA, which I played it. It suddenly had all this other stuff, which was, it felt a bit producer-y. If you get me. It’s like, what about if we do Grand Theft Auto? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Matrix is in it. I mean, of course, of course, you know, it’s pinked your ice cream top. So, but I liked the ambition of that, of that world. I just then realized it was a bit of a busted flush to keep going for it. Saints Row, I think, fulfilled a, in one way or another, fulfilled a need, especially Saints Row 2, which I seem to remember having a good time with in its co-op. So when GTA 4 was accused of being rather more, shall we say, serious, because you’ve got us from San Andreas, Jetpacks, Area 51, to GTA 4 story and the necessary technological limitations of some of the stuff. They eventually built all that craziness back here, but at that point they felt like they were focusing so much on the story, and that’s fine. If Nico is telling a story about searching for a new life in America and trying to escape his past, if you’ve got a jetpack, it might undermine the legitimacy of the message somewhat. So I think Saints Row fulfilled its purpose for a lot of people. I think people were, again, sort of looking for… They wanted fun, and so maybe GTA 4 wasn’t supplying much fun. It was supplying something really excellent, but not what they were accustomed to. And Saints Row is like, thank you very much. I think a lot of them had something interesting, at the very least, or something to offer as the series kind of zigged and zagged. But I don’t think any of them got close to what it could be when it was firing on every cylinder. That’s why I love the GTA 4, the DLC. That was very, to me at least, very obviously the staging ground for the mobile character GTA 5, which then in and of itself says you’ve got to have characters with different personalities which fulfill different needs for players. So that was their reaction to, I believe, some of the pushback. So this is all well and good, and this is great, and this New York’s insane, and I love this story, but I don’t want to go bowling. I want to get a machine gun and just fucking, you know, just fly around, you know, shooting people in the back. So I think a lot of them had something, and a lot of them took where GTA was, and then kind of maybe went, as I said, the wrong way and tried to push a lot of the tech stuff when really, you know, again, the aforementioned boiling point, a lot of shooters, you know, talking about Far Cry and the rest of it, you know, suddenly that was maybe an option. I remember reading a preview, I think, in Games TM of the original Far Cry, and getting really excited. I think they called it Encounter Design or Five Minutes of Fun or, you know, something along those kind of late Halo-ish action bubble sort of line. And that reminded me of GTA. Okay, as Matthew was saying, we can do this. So a lot of them, I mean, some of them were just fucking toilet, but… But, you know, even games like, say, Just Calls, the first one, I quite like the second one, first one, that was again, right, it’s massive. The island is massive. Okay, but it had a cool thing. Yeah, they’re grabbing it. Right, all right, fun. So I think each of them had something, but they could never marry it to what GTA does when it’s at its height. Yeah, I think a lot of them went, like, lowest common denominator when… When I think about GTA III, one of the first things I think about is the opening with the music and the sort of moving images, moving still images that make up the opening credits, and it’s so kind of, like, classy. And, yeah, I think that all of the clones, like, took a different piece of it and built out on that, but it was generally tied to, you know, how do we make… how do we add bullet time to this or how do we escalate the tone of this so it’s, like, even sillier, or how do we put The Simpsons in this? Um, so, yeah, whereas, like, GTA always had, like, a layer of classiness, so maybe you wouldn’t think of GTA as being classy when you sort of think about the series generally, but it is, you know, it is classy. And, yeah, I think… Its cohesion was what made it feel like that, right? The original Saints Row, I remember the demo coming out, and that was another big thing, a big cue for Xbox 360 is that suddenly you were moving away from having to pay, you know, $4.99 or whatever, like, for, you know, an official mag with demos on it. And so suddenly it was, to me, that was a little bit like the VHS revolution in the 80s for knockoffs. So suddenly you could have a version of something much more famous and influential and good. If you got into people’s hands at the right time, they would watch that shit, all play it. And if it was easily available, Lost Planet, that was the first, didn’t it crack like a million downloads and suddenly everyone was now sitting up going, so if we got GTA, or a version of GTA, and there’s no new GTA on the horizon for what seems like decades, cool. I remember it caused a bit of a stir, especially because, you know, it looked like it did at the time, which everyone really liked. It seemed like it was fidelity, not necessarily its art design. So, yeah, I think there’s, I think, but all of them were chasing an element of GTA, whereas GTA was just going to outpace them every single time, so you’re just left in the dust again. There were a few takes post GTA IV of Saints Row 1 is better than GTA IV. I remember thinking, come on, that’s insane. It was like, I think that there was just a bit of bad intent to some of those takes. I just think that people weren’t willing to engage with what GTA IV was trying to do, which was like, you know, flawed in a lot of ways, but also worthwhile in terms of like, I don’t know, it was sincere. And then I feel like when Rockstar went back to not being sincere, and every character being a bastard who calls you up, and you take missions from, people didn’t really like that either. And so, yeah, it’s a tone thing. Yeah, it is. And I think what it is is you’re now so big, and there’s so much on the line. And I think this is the same with franchises as they go along, is that suddenly it’s very difficult for both the creator and the player to move away from certain things that defined an experience before, even if you’re trying to do something different. So as an example, I was very… I was the only player in the world, pretty much, it seems, who was really good at driving in GTA IV. And people hated that. Well, I don’t hate it, but, you know, they didn’t like the fact everything seemed to turn like a boat in the weight of it. But I played so much GTA IV online, Cops and Crooks, and I’m shit at shooting, but I can drive. And so suddenly there was this done app. GTA V comes out, they tweak the handling. And you’re like, suddenly that’s taken away the edge, whether that’s what I’m good at or what I like or both. Once you hit a level of success and then do a follow up, there’s always going to be someone or people in general who don’t… And you see this actually more acutely, I think, with first-person shooters. I mean, that can happen within the same game when something gets nerfed or buffed, right? Destiny 2 being the main one. So I think that’s a necessary sort of evil, as it were. They have to kind of get over it. So the last thing I was to ask, then, was whether GTA ultimately lived up to the potential of these PS2 games. Matthew, I’ll start with you. Are more and more spectacular worlds all we really want from the future of GTA? Or is there something that these games had that maybe we don’t see so much now? What’s your take on where GTA is at and where you want it to go? Oh, shit, I should have thought of a good answer for this. Sorry, did you think I wasn’t going to ask you another question? No, I read this question beforehand and I thought, oh yeah, I’ll wing it, but it’s not really a wingable question. Like, it requires some thought and consideration. I’m getting images of Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock. I’m at my best when I’m under pressure. How about I lay out some thoughts, Matthew? Listen, I would love to hear your thoughts, which I can then agree with. Okay, good, yeah, good podcasting. So yeah, I personally think that a lot of it is here and if anything, they’re a little bit too indebted to these games. I keep thinking about a mission in GTA Online I did where it’s one of the highest missions and you’re blocked into this little square and then enemies come at these three different alleyways and then push towards you and then you have to survive and get out. And I was there thinking, is this actually open world game design? I mean, we talked about this earlier, like it was much more sort of guided hand and like, yeah, there are some missions in GTA III that hint at that not being the case. I think about Espresso To Go, which is a fucking nightmare mission where you have to smash these nine different drug stands across the three islands. Yeah, an absurd timeframe. And I needed like a guide to tell, there’s a specific order you can do it that won’t break your brain, but it took me ages to do it. But it was like, in a sense, it was kind of like sort of a freeform mission design where it’s like, well, you have to figure out what the optimal route is. So you can start on this island, start on that island, you can go to this one first or that one first, and it becomes this grand thing of like, you have to figure out what it is ultimately. It’s just one objective. But then you can do mad stuff like, well, if I turn on the flying car cheat and instead of having to drive to this bridge, I just fly over to the next island and smash it that way, and the game will still let you finish the mission and move on. I think about how that GTA Online mission had been hemmed into that square, but this isn’t so much open world mission design, and I do wonder if the future of GTA might be more exciting if it did have that MGS5 style thing of, well, this is the mission, we’ll drop you in, you can go pick up anything you like or come from the sky, from the sea, whatever it might be in order to finish this. And I think that that is maybe what I think that Rockstar need. There’s nothing wrong with their world building or the worlds they design, they’re fantastic, but I think an evolution in mission design is the thing that I think maybe GTA could use. Any thoughts on that, Matthew? I completely agree. Steve, what do you think? Is there anything else that you think that the future of GTA really needs or anything that got lost from these PS2 games going forwards? There’s a heist mission, I’m not sure if it’s the same one, I think it’s the bank robbery, and then you do start in a square and you’re on motorcycles and someone’s in a truck, and I remember rage quitting it like a child because I just tried to do something similar where after failing it a few times, I realised that this is the basic attack pattern, so I’m just going to hop on and fuck off, and then it goes, yeah, you’ve left the mission area. I’m like, well, I’m trying, I’m trying to get out of it. I think that what GTA Online says to me is that the experience is trying to go deeper rather than necessarily wider. So yes, there are, there’s that other island and then there’s the new Diamond Casino, I believe. But that’s more iterative rather than saying, hey, and now there’s another 400 miles of whatever. So I think I was always really into the weird sort of proto GTA Online-ness of GTA Vice City Stories where towards at some point maybe just when you kind of open the world up properly, you can start deciding on your criminal empire. And you know, you’ve got the rackets and you’ve got how much money you put in protection and this. And I always thought that in GTA V, and this is what GTA Online actually achieved, GTA V to me in its initial release, I wasn’t, I mean, I love it, I wasn’t upset by it. I thought there’s something else here and I described it as using money like most people would use bullets. It’s about using money to influence the world and that’s exactly what they’ve gotten into now, right? So you’ve got to essentially, they have the job titles, you know, you’re the CEO or all this, and that’s fine. So I think wherever they go, will be more like that. And maybe this is just the last vestiges of the GTA V way of doing things and the older GTAs. I’d be amazed if they released a new one anytime soon. But I’d also be amazed if it wasn’t pretty much persistent online, make the world as you want to see it, which is what they’re doing now. And it’s obviously phenomenally successful. So I think it’s a bit of both. GTA Online says to me, that’s where the money is for them and that’s where the depth, rather than breadth, is where they’re going to win. It wouldn’t surprise me if the world was slightly smaller in the next one, but from the get-go, you could get into all of this stuff, whilst also having a story which leads you through. See, I think they’re actually going to keep them more separated than ever in a sense. I think that they’re so aware of people’s criticism that they don’t make single-player DLC anymore, but they make loads of GTA Online updates. They’ll keep those as like, they’ll be very binary. You’ll do your story and then you’ll have the online option to go with it. I guess we’ll see, that’s a big unknown. Another point, there’s one year separating the release between GTA III and Vice City, and there’s probably going to be 10 years at least between GTA V and GTA VI. What a different world we live in. Yeah, I also had something the other day where I realized that when GTA San Andreas launched, the pop culture or the cultural place it was set in, which seemed so long ago, which if you deducted the same amount of years from now, would be around about 2009. So after the release of GTA IV, yeah, we’re doomed, man. Me and Matthew talked about this on a podcast, but I think the gap between Vice City, I think Vice City relative to when it was released is like 2005 to now. I think it’s like late 80s. And we were saying, what would you put in it that represented 2005 culturally? And we came up with Paris Hilton and the film Inside Man. And those are like, that was all we could do to sum up those years. I saw Inside Man in the fair and I didn’t hate it, but I did not see Paris Hilton. But yeah, it’s hard to think of those things. I mean, I don’t know, there’ll be something. Now I’m thinking about 2005 and a lot of those early to mid aughts, as wankers would call them, I suppose, just feels like a real wasteland. It’s all low rise women’s trousers. That’s the game. And the OC, that’s it. And Von Dutcher, whatever cats. Yeah, it’s strange. Well, I mean, that’s the very blinkered and myopic version here. But yeah, I would love them just for a run. I would love them to do… If they’re going to do story stuff still, I would love them to do almost like a GTA anthology. You know, I’d love a 70s LA one. And yeah, there’s parallel lines. Actually, a lot of people really like that, don’t they? We didn’t discuss that one earlier. For it’s time hopping and stuff like that. But yeah, I would like that. But yeah, it has been so long. And the simple fact is that GTA Online is simply too profitable for a company to just go, right, on to the next one. You just can’t because someone’s going to go, well, what about me? So it’s no wonder to me, really. Whatever it is, there will be a bit where a man comes out of a door and tells you to go and kill someone. And then he will say something funny and then he’ll go back inside. Amen. OK, so let’s wrap up there then. So Steve, where can people find you on social media? Well, terribly loaded question. I’m at the Steve Burnio, the Burnio’s B-U-R-N-I-O. I use that the most. Yeah, that’s pretty much it for that. Yeah, you can go onto Twitter and read my many and varied hot takes on why new Halloween movies don’t work. Why their mise en scene is bad. And you’ll go, man, this guy’s full of shit on the podcast and it’s getting worse. But no, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Now, I really appreciate you joining us, Steve, and sharing your thoughts on GTA here. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I’m at MrBattleUnderscorePesto. You can follow me at Samuel W. Roberts. The podcast is Back Page Pod. You can email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. Ask us a question, that sort of stuff. But yeah, thanks again, Steve. I look forward to playing that GTA Definitive Edition and pitching, if you enjoy the later GTA games, you need to go to jail. That sounds like a good answer. Yeah, I mean, it’ll work, dude. You can say anything these days. You can come out and say The Godfather Part 2 shit. Someone will agree. There was some unbelievable take earlier today. Saying, yeah, Halloween is just a ripoff of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What are we talking about? It’s fundamentally different. One of the guys got a mask on, so is the other one. Right. Good. Right. Got it. You can just say anything these days. And negative feedback is sometimes worth more than positive. Well, there you go. And you can look forward to our 10-part Halloween podcast with Steve coming soon. Well, if you’d like fairly dry Miz and Sam as I said, breakdowns of cultural wars for outdated video games, you come to exactly the right place. OK, great. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll be back next week.