History of GTA

GTA stands out as one of the most popular video game series ever created. Its cultural impact rivals that of major Nintendo franchises while maintaining a distinct attitude and narrative universes far removed from Kyoto's company. The series progressively paints a critical and satirical portrait of the American dream in Uncle Sam's country. GTA Vice City depicts a Miami corrupted by money and drugs, GTA San Andreas covers the ethnic tensions of 1992 Los Angeles, GTA V develops a critique of spectacle society, American imperialism...

Rockstar gradually turns its games into excellent interactive films but into average video games, compared to recent titles that are more accomplished in terms of performative and narrative agency given to the player, such as The Last Of Us, Breath Of The Wild, Baldur’s Gates 3... GTA presents itself as a cultural product of subversion, moral transgression. But this transgression is strictly framed by a commercial imperative: to be widely distributed in the United States, the game must meet the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) M rating (17 and older) criteria. Its contents adhere to precise moral and legal matrices, which are directly written into the code, the structuring tool of the gaming experience. The idea is not to say that GTA does not operate moral transgression; the media reactions from its first opus show the opposite. Rather, it is a matter of highlighting that this subversion adheres to structures it claims to surpass. Modding, RP, and machinima practices are undoubtedly just as eloquent on the subject of transgression. Acting directly on the nature of the code and the modalities of the game, they are themselves transgressive. They bring about another playful object with updated signs and meanings.

GTA (1997)

GTA was almost born by accident: it was initially developed to be Race n’Chase, a game where a police officer (the player) must stop stolen cars or, conversely, play the thief fleeing the police. The first tests of the game demonstrate a general boredom with the gaming experience. The development studio (DMA Design) faces technical and financial difficulties, temporarily alleviated by the intervention of BMG Interactive. It is a bug that will ultimately save its development. In "bandit" mode, the police cars, whose driving is supposed to block the player's path, behave erratically and create chaotic situations in the streets. Testers then find much more interest in this game mode, and DMA decides to make it a unique, nervous, and fast experience that will become Grand Theft Auto. Max Clifford, an advertiser hired by BMG (and since convicted of sexual offenses), highlights the violent and amoral nature of the game in his advertising campaign to attract media attention: bad buzz is still buzz. This first controversy deliberately provoked by Clifford, far from being an accident, will serve to recognize the uniqueness of GTA. However, this will not be enough to forget the technical delay, the clumsiness of the game's controls, and the absence of the initially promised violence. GTA will not, like Mortal Kombat (1993), lead to an evolution of the age classification frameworks for video games—in the United States and elsewhere. This first opus nevertheless finds its audience (1M sales), seduced by the freedoms of action and exploration allowed.

GTA II (1999)

GTA II offers a more substantial narrative proposal than the first version of the series. Gangs interposed fight for control of Anywhere City, the playground of this second opus. Belonging to one of them, the player must complete missions to acquire a status that generates fear and respect, attracting the hostility of rival gangs. The narrative plot focuses on the fight against Zaibatsu (in Japanese: conglomerate of companies), a corporation that controls many aspects of life in Anywhere City.

The game suffers from an even more pronounced technical lag than its predecessor and suffers from comparison with Driver[^1], released a few months earlier and which also offers the opportunity to traverse a city in 3D at the wheel of different vehicles. It is released a few months after the Columbine massacre, whose author was a regular player of Doom II[^2], a title known for its violence and infernal visual universe. This is a major turning point in the generalist media treatment of video games: the practice becomes a public health issue in the United States, as the violence it represents would influence the behavior of young people. Terry Donovan, then CEO of Rockstar Games, will say in an interview with the specialized press published in Computer Games Magazine: « Our responsibility is to 99.9 percent of the population who aren’t actually planning to murder anyone in the next two weeks »[^3].

GTA III (2001)

GTA III is part of a long line of titles with large-scale worlds, including Elite (1984), The Legend of Zelda (1986), and more directly Shenmue (1999), and marks a key date in the appearance of the concept of open world. The ambition of scale and detail carried by the game is a milestone and sets quality standards for the series, as well as for the entire high-budget video game production. The wise choice is made to switch from a project destined for the Dreamcast to the Playstation 2 (which will sell sixteen times more than SEGA's console). Take Two Interactive participates in the American national mourning of September 11 by postponing the release of GTA III, and takes advantage of this extra time to modify elements that could be associated with terrorism or the New York police, the city largely inspiring the game.

GTA III aims to be an interactive gangster film drawing inspiration from works like Heat (1995) or The Sopranos (1999-2007), and takes place in Liberty City. The scenario, which develops around a New York mafia, is not the most advanced and does not represent the most important technical or artistic advancement of the opus. Rather, we will remember the transition to a three-dimensional world, the use of motion capture, the care given to cinematics, and the great freedom of approach regarding the completion of missions.

GTA III is the best-selling game of the year 2001. It opens a golden age for Rockstar, which continues with the titles Max Payne (2001) and State of Emergency (2002), which meet significant critical and commercial success. By pushing realism further than before, Rockstar also makes the violence of GTA more palpable. The title causes concern in Australia where it is banned from sale, as well as in the prefecture of Kanagawa in Japan. Jason Rubin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, will say about the game that marketing it is like selling cigarettes to children. This will not be the last time a parallel is drawn between GTA and drugs.

GTA Vice City (2002)

With GTA Vice City, Rockstar inaugurates a tradition that continues to this day. The development team travels to Miami for a field study during the pre-production phase. Game designers and artists document the architecture, fashion styles, population, musical trends...

The studio indeed aims to bring the narrative ambition of the series to a new level by choosing to set part of the diegesis of GTA in the real history of the city. Vice City thus reflects the image of 1980s Miami: a playground for real estate barons of cocaine and an entry point for the crack epidemic in North America. Rockstar makes no secret of the cinematic inspirations of the game (sometimes even going as far as direct citation), with Scarface (1983) and Miami Vice (1984-1989) being the most important among them.

It is with these new paradigms that Rockstar sets for a time the formula of GTA: symbolic spatial and temporal anchoring, advanced narrative plot, thoughtful staging, cult radios, while the new design of the covers is definitively fixed. The studio confirms with this game that it is now to be considered one of the most important in the industry. If Vice City is technically very close to GTA III, the scale of its map is much larger: more importance is given to stolen aircraft, and the interiors of some buildings are now accessible. The musical curation for the creation of the nine radio stations is particularly ambitious, notably calling on Yes, Kool & the Gang, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson... This will also be the case for all successors of Vice City, which will further link GTA to its radio stations (Flash FM, K-DST, Rebel Radio). Today, the game is one of the most appreciated by speedrunners and modders. The creation of additional content continues through fan-made remasters, mission packs, difficulty modes, and even zombie modes.

GTA San Andreas (2004)

GTA San Andreas benefits from a development time twice that of Vice City, which is reflected in the care given to the urban environment and its surroundings, the writing of the plot and characters, the diversity of vehicles, radio stations, and NPCs. For example, eight hundred sixty-one voice actors are credited in the game's credits, and each NPC has one hour of unique lines (compared to ten minutes in Vice City). The releases of the games become spaced out from this episode; they are highly anticipated and mark the times; every detail of the trailers is scrutinized for clues about the gameplay, places to visit, characters...

The game takes as its backdrop 1992 Los Angeles (called Los Santos). Gang wars, riots, and the crack epidemic, which no longer confines itself to the Atlantic Coast of the United States, are found there. It should be noted that the work of defining Los Santos is much more advanced than for San Fierro and Las Venturas, the two other metropolises present in the game. The latter testify to traditional imaginaries around the cities of San Francisco and Las Vegas, carried by the Golden Gate, the Transamerica Pyramid, The Strip, and the Hoover Dam, among others.

Sam Houser wants to push for this episode playable sexual content, which will result in the United States in an Adults Only classification instead of the usual Mature (17+) assigned to GTA games. This classification effectively excludes San Andreas from its main distribution channel, namely Walmart, which does not distribute games of this type. Take Two categorically refuses that these explicit contents be included in the final version of the game. The Rockstar teams then bury them in the code, but they end up being unearthed by an amateur in the Netherlands. This is the Hot Coffee scandal (name of an activity at the end of which the player has sexual relations with his girlfriend), which surpasses all those that GTA has known in the past. Jack Thompson, a lawyer known for moral crusades against hip-hop and video games[^4], seizes the case, which he reports to Hillary Clinton, then a senator and carrier of a bill aimed at regulating the video game market[^5]. The latter will compare the practice of video games to the lead poisoning of youth and propose to treat it as smoking, alcoholism, or pornography are treated[^6]. Take Two will have to spend millions of dollars on withdrawing copies as well as in a version of the game expurgated of the hidden sexual contents.

GTA IV (2008)

Between 2007 and 2008, video game revenues surpass, for the first time and durably, those of the film industry. At stake, the ever-growing interest of youth for the medium, but also new commercial practices that begin to normalize: DLC, microtransactions... The AAA industry of this era also experiences increasingly long development cycles and production budgets, rivaling those of major Hollywood productions. GTA IV is therefore very much a game of its time, which will require four years of development, compared to two for San Andreas, and is extended by two paid expansions. It should be noted that these expansions amply justify their existence, by their creative and narrative richness, compared to an Oblivion Horse Armor Pack or a paid mount in World of Warcraft.

GTA IV reinvests the metropolis of Liberty City seven years after GTA III. This iteration is larger, more detailed, and more alive, in short, more credible as a modeling of a real city, its flows of people, information, and modes of transport. Technical advances are generally in line with those of previous episodes: movements, driving, shooting... The cell phone from which CJ received calls in San Andreas is now usable by the player, notably to trigger missions, order weapons, call a taxi, or a loved one.

Starting with GTA IV, Rockstar sets the diegetic temporalities of the games in its flagship series in the present of their realization. No more retrospective trips on a notable unit of space and time in recent U.S. history. Rockstar now wants to match temporality and game release date. And Niko's (the game's protagonist) cell phone testifies to this issue. At the end of the adventure and at the height of his success, he does not own an iFruit (equivalent of the iPhone), and cannot observe them in Liberty City, in the palm of passersby or in an iFruit Store. It is mentioned only once on the occasion of a line of dialogue in the extension The Lost and Damned (2009).

The colorimetry of GTA IV immediately catches the eye of the player used to previous opus; it is raw, desaturated, the sunsets have an air of the end of the world that is a bit too slow to arrive. The game is released in the midst of a global recession and glimpses through its color grading choices the global economic and climatic anxiety, the death of the hopes of the third millennium acted by the attacks of September 11. Rockstar experiments with multi-perspective narration in the DLCs, giving the player missions he has completed in the main game campaign, embodying another protagonist this time and prefiguring the three-voice narrative of GTA V.

GTA V (2013)

GTA V is released approximately three months after the Snowden revelations about global Internet and telecommunications surveillance by the NSA. The game openly states a society of information whose highways are now under the control and very attentive gaze of private companies and governments. The latter occupy a significant place in the narrative and visual universe of GTA V. Rockstar's game design practices indeed reflect this state of the contemporary world, including the fragmentation of information, global surveillance, and platformization.

The studio pushes further than ever the customization of the gaming experience: planning of robberies, acquisition of properties, purchase and customization of the 285 vehicles, visits to the psychiatrist... The result is a certain atomization of practices, a diversification of playful scenarios, each player exploring to varying degrees the game modalities offered. However, one cannot argue that the tens of millions of GTA V games played since 2013 obey totally different regimes of truth. Rockstar exercises very firm control over the gaming experience. The campaign missions have only one precise way of being accomplished, the learning and mastery of the game systems by the player are fundamentally denied. These are antithetical to the perfectly constructed story wanted by the screenwriters of GTA V. The cinematics also participate in this effort to bring the player back as a simple intermediary of a narrative thread much more cinematic than video game. One can briefly gloss over the achievements and collectibles that represent as many tools of control (and surveillance?) of the game modalities, namely to accomplish such an action, collect statues, among others. These systems are exacerbated in the GTA Online experience, a multiplayer platform where everything is a pretext to make the player "crack" for the purchase of in-game liquidities at exorbitant prices.

Today, the Grand Theft Auto series belongs to a common imagination thanks to its aesthetics, gameplay, and multiple controversies. These games have been built over two decades by addressing the tropes of the United States over nearly fifty years. Each opus is a premium experience, whose success and cultural impact are anticipated and whose posterity is no longer in question given their production quality and the strong replayability supported by players' appropriation. However, the critique of the series on the excess and deviation of an American dream that has long been utopian itself gives way to logics that distance it more and more. Moreover, GTA has become such a phenomenon that it is surprising that the license confines itself to the video game format, the games having acquired an undeniable cinematic dimension, both in their realism and in the themes addressed. This is perhaps what explains the interest it arouses among artists, theorists, and activists who appropriate its framework within diversion practices to produce and develop new works whose scope is both critical, subversive, and aesthetic.

Notes

[^1]: Video game released on PlayStation, developed by Reflections Interactive from 1999 to 2004, then by Ubisoft Reflections from 2006 onwards. [^2]: First-person shooter (FPS) video game, developed by id Software and initially published on MS-DOS by GT Interactive in 1994. It follows a first opus, Doom, released in 1993. [^3]: Terry Donovan, Computer Games Magazine, 2005. In this interview, Donovan defends the idea that players know how to distinguish between fiction and reality, and that games are not responsible for violent behaviors. [^4]: Jack Thompson, On The Jace Hall Show, 2008. Jace Hall, a former video game developer, debates on his show The Jace Hall Show about violence in video games with Jack Thompson. [^5]: See on this subject the article « Hillary Clinton Targets Violence In Video Games », in the online magazine Rockyrama which reports the press conference in which senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) presented a federal bill aimed at protecting children from inappropriate video games, Rockyrama, November 2005, [online], http://rockyrama.com/super-stylo-article/quand-hillary-clinton-entrait-en-guerre-contre-les-jeux-video [^6]: ibid.

Translated by AI from the French version.