I always feel old when I read Reddit comments by people who say they feel old because they remember when GTA III came out. I played a lot of GTA I and II in the late 90s/early 00s. Admittedly GTA I felt a bit dated at the time but GTA II was great. The top-down view didn't age well I guess but made it feel quite distinctive. I feel like in a lot of people's minds the series only really began at III.

Similar effect with the Fallout series. A whole lot of the fanbase has never played any of the three 2D games (Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics). The series started, for them, with Fallout 3.

I’m kinda that way with Elder Scrolls. My first one was III (Morrowind) and I’ve still never played the first two.

I'm more than old enough to remember the original GTA and GTA II, and I have friends who played and loved both of them. For me, I thought the first GTA had graphics from the past (I'd got too used to playing 3D shooters on PC - along with Wipeout on the Playstation - so struggled to get past the top down presentation), and just felt janky to play. GTA II was more polished, but I still didn't love it. Yet people raved about them.

Anyway, the negative associations I had with GTA I and GTA II stopped me from playing any other GTA game until 4 came out in 2008, at which point I was like, OK, FFS, people won't stop banging on about this so I suppose I'll try it again. I ended up really liking it but, because I only played it on friends' consoles, and I started the game several times over, I never played it all the way through until 2018. I then played through both the expansions, along with GTA V in 2019. I've subsequently gone back to play III and Vice City, both of which I also like - as well as Vice City Stories on the PSP. I've barely touched San Andreas, but the few minutes I have played suggest that I'll also enjoy it.

I've even fired up GTA and GTA II again... but still don't really get on with either of them. I presume there must be others out there who were put off enough by them that it meant they've never touched the rest of the series, or only got into again several games later, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly common experience.

I remember the DOS (?) GTA demo that came on a PC Gaming magazine demo disk. I think it had a ten minute time limit?

Tons of fun on a friends dark green Acer Aspire.

And you could reach 1 million $ on those 10 mins, just had to put a bomb car south to the start point, get the orange guys to follow you, get inside the car, trigger the bomb and wait for detonation inside the car.

Additionally, you could go under the fences if you parked a heavy vehicle next to them and crawled below it.

Don't forget walking below the city entering the spot where the water was solid on northwest pier.

And finally, if you left the train in the precise spot, you could exit the train on top of the (eletrified) tracks and would not die.

Yes! I remember it, it was around 1997/98, I was a kid and couldn't believe a game like that could exist lol! it was so crazy for that time

Oh yes! I remember playing that at a friend's house when I was 5 years old and having my little mind blown. I couldn't believe you could just take any car and go anywhere you wanted.

I later got my hands on a copy of GTA2 and played that a lot, behind my parents' back of course

I played GTA after I played Carmageddon and I thought the graphics on GTA were kind of retro at the time, but in reflection, it does have some charm, I think.

Loved carmageddon, and yes graphics felt far more modern than GTA. Still loved Agra though

Dropped out of gaming before GTA3 came out hut was given a PlayStation and gta v last year, very disappointed there was no “gouranga”

Also available at; https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto/ where WASM is used to emulate Windows 95 in your browser.

I'm sure it was officially re-released for modern (of the day) PCs before this? I think I've still got it on discs somewhere, a set of the first trilogy, Vice City, and maybe San Andreas.

Those were GTA3 versions. The linked version is for the original GTA with the classical top view perspective.

You might want to add [2022] in the title

Check out Exodos for this type of thing. It's built on launchbox (an emulator front end) and just gives a huge listing of every game you might ever want to play. Those games aren't all installed (assuming you didn't do the full 500GB+ install) but you click the game and it quickly downloads, installs into dosbox and jumps into the game (takes seconds since these are old games).

Slightly related, if like me you have gone far to far down the emulation rabbit hole and find that you are now onto FPGA emulation, you might enjoy:

https://0mhz.net/

https://amiga.vision/

I really want to get these working on my steamdeck too but it looks like a lot of work.

The best version - thank you.

Love GTA1, but IIRC my version at least is a 3dfx glide game which makes it quite hard to play on modern kit.

Will give this a try.

This post has nothing to do with AI. Plus, these games are classics not just because of their mechanics. Nearly the entire library of the NES were games trying, and failing, to replicate the magic of Super Mario Bros.

Yes, and I have always found it amusing because on the surface it was run right, jump, repeat.

Take care with the link folks:

- it's a fork of the main repo with much less eyeballs*

- following directions on the repo leads to arbitrary code execution, on your machine, via an LLM controlled by prompts and code from the repo

- comment is unrelated to TFA besides "video game"

* for all I know this is the new cool repo, but...the combination of circumstances is suspicious.