[NoboruWataya]

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.

[secretballot]

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.

[amatecha]

Yeah, for me, Fallout 1 and 2 are the definitive Fallout games (ignoring Tactics as I never played it). I felt like 3 and onward were like Elder Scrolls total conversions, and I always saw them as "spiritual successors" but not exactly cut from the same cloth, or something. Like, same universe, but very different style and feel, and far less memorable or influential to me. Of course I played the first two games at a far more impressionable age, but the actual atmosphere of the games was a lot more gritty and impactful, even comparing the "eras" today.

[reactordev]

Daggerfall is a must!!! You'll get to see how it shaped Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls games that came after (including Morrowind)

[Klaster_1]

Morrowind was my first TES too and I recently tried Daggerfall Unity. In 20 hours, I learned that I don't like shallow vast sea games at all. I don't want to "reolplay" and grind computer generated quests. Even Starfield was better as it at least had modern quest lines, although with awful writing.

[tmtvl]

Did you deliberately leave out Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, or did you just forget it exists?

[randomNumber7]

I remember the mission in GTAII where you had to first steal and then drive a bus to collect people. You bring the people to some sausage factory where you see how they are driven onto a conveyor belt. Then you have to drive a hot dog car to sell it before the mission is finished.

[tosti]

Not just that, but they came out skin-coloured so they had been stripped. A few wanted to make a run and got shot.

In another mission (early in the game iirc) you have to steal a car parked at that same restaurant and one of the radio hosts makes a stink about it on air.

[Semaphor]

> the series only really began

It ended with the new GTA, with the new one obviously being III ;) I spent so much time playing I and especially II, then was very disappointed with III.

GTA II also had one of my favorite bugs (that kinda required cheating): As long as you were throwing grenades, you wouldn’t move on the z-axis. So if you had unlimited grenades (or I guess just a lot of them without cheating), you could fly from one skyscraper to where ever else as long as you kept throwing those grenades. Just needed to remember to be on something as high when you stop throwing, or you’d still splat :D

[mohn]

Nice, love a good grenade glitch! I owned and played a bit of GTA II, but never knew about this. I like the grenade glitches in the Command & Conquer series where, if you click again to retarget during the grenadier's windup animation, they will ignore the range check and can throw arbitrarily far.

[imcritic]

Similarly, if you place enough cars near each other - you can start jumping over one and then just float around those cars indefinitely without ever touching ground and risking off getting arrested.

However, if cops or anyone else start shooting at cars - they will eventually explode and thus get you WASTED.

[NoboruWataya]

IIRC you didn't even have to throw them? I think if you tapped the button quickly enough you would initiate the throwing motion but not actually throw the grenade, and that would be enough to keep you in the air.

[bananaboy]

Same! I mentioned this in another comment but I really loved GTA1+2 and played them a lot, and was disappointed that 3 lost a lot of the charm and humour that I felt was there in 1+2. It was so serious and dark and I didn't connect with it at all.

[QuantumNomad_]

My first time playing anything in the GTA series was the GameBoy Color version of GTA 2. I borrowed it from a friend for a week or two, and enjoyed it quite a lot. My parents were pretty against me playing any kind of “violent” video games. So secretly playing GTA 2 on the GBC was kind of exciting due to that as well. Even though the “violence” in GTA 2 on GBC is of course very tame in terms of any kind of graphic realism or anything.

A few years later one of my friends was playing GTA III on the PS2 at his home. I also had a PS2, but there was no chance of my parents letting me play that, and I didn’t even play it at his house either.

Later still, Rockstar was giving away GTA 2 for PC for free on their website. So I played GTA 2 a little bit on PC too, after GTA III (and probably Vice City) was already out.

It took many years before I finally had a chance to play GTA III, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas. My first time playing GTA III and GTA Vice City was when I was an adult with an iPhone and they sold iOS ports of those games in the App Store. I ended up completing GTA III and GTA Vice City on the iPhone and have played a bit of GTA San Andreas on the iPhone as well, including completing the famous train mission.

[7thpower]

I remember one of my brother’s friends bringing over gta 3 and, after having played gta 2 and the 1960s London version, having my early teenage mind absolutely blown. One of my older brothers had a job and had copped a ps2, and let me play it when he was at work or with friends.

I must’ve crashed the dodo hundreds of times, trying to figure it out in a pre YouTube world, where the best I could do is exchange tips with my friends at school.

[arcanemachiner]

That mission's not very hard... All you have to do is follow the damn train, CJ!

[torh]

I remember playing GTA I with a 3DFX card. Man that was smooth. When I later played at a friends house, I was disappointed about how choppy it was.

[int_19h]

I haven't played GTA 2 much, but the first one was certainly pretty violent narratively speaking. I remember a mission where you have to drive a truck full of explosives into a building and blow it up, for instance.

[esskay]

GTAII was really weird for me, it ran at 0.5x speed. Later realised it wasn't any sort of GPU limitation but was due to some quirk with how it was tied to CPU. I had an off-brand CPU (a Transmeta if I recall) running on an old Mc Donalds workstation ripped out of an old office when they upgraded. It 'ran' just very, very weirdly. It wasn't until I saw a friend playing it on their computer that I realised that it wasn't in fact supposed to work like that!

[bluedino]

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.

[user2722]

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.

[brnt]

I played the GTA I demo to death after hours at school... 320x240 without any hardware acceleration, but I drove those streets err'y day for what feels like years but probably was months. I think adults did not really realize what kind of game it was. Me neither.

[barbs]

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

[boredemployee]

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

[antidamage]

Check out Rustler Grand Theft Horse on the Epic Games Store, it's the same top-down format, very GTA-like but set in medieval times, yet has all of the modern banter. It's so great.

[m-schuetz]

GTA II is still my favourite GTA.

[glenstein]

Used to play it with my siblings after dinner in multiplayer. I loved getting invisibility and trying to sneak up behind them with a flamethrower.

[rigrassm]

One of my favorite Easter eggs that I discovered on my own was the "Elvis has left the building" message you get when you ran over the entire line of Elvis impersonators walking down the street. I Can't remember off the top of my head if it was GTA 2 or 3.

My #1 favorite was accidentally discovering that if you shoot some missiles at the Statue of Liberty in Twisted Metal 2.

[tosti]

Here's what happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrZ6P9TsfI

[Lammy]

I like how GTAⅢ is the only 3D GTA game (not 3D-era GTA game, because Chinatown Wars lol) where you can permanently select the oldschool top-down camera. It's kind of a trip to play it that way.

[MBCook]

I never knew that.

PS: loved Chinatown Wars. Unfortunate it’s not better known.

[Agingcoder]

A couple of days ago a colleague of mine was talking about very old rts games he still liked to play , and mentioned red alert. It turned out he had never heard of dune 2, Warcraft 1 and 2!

[ElCapitanMarkla]

I loved GTA II and spent hours playing it when I was about 14 or so. I don't recall keeping up with III's development at all and I remember seeing it popup on Kazaa one day, in an exe not much over 100mb. I was expecting another top down addition to the series and my mind was blown. Not only that it was this massive 3d game, but that someone had managed to compress it all down to such a small package.

[vdupras]

Oh my, this is a slap in the face for me too. For me, GTA is the first one. The other ones (III and following) are GTA with 3D and a story line slapped on top. I must have a dislike for 3D because I've tried again the original GTA a few years ago and liked it a lot more than GTA III+. It's just fun without complication.

[Markoff]

same here, but didn't like it already at that time, never played 3D versions, GTA 1 was extremely outdated already at time of release in 1997, by that time I was already playing Screamer 2 with pretty great 3D graphics or Need for Speed, heck in 1997 they already released NFS2 (though I least liked this release and take NFS1 or NFS3 any time over NFS2)

was always more UFO: Enemy Unknown, Sim City (2000) or Transport Tycoon guy

but I vividly remember playing my first PC game in father's work on weekends - Crystal Caves https://www.playdosgames.com/play/crystal-caves

[neocron]

Played the first "3" on the first PlayStation. Completely different game from where it went since GTA 3.

And while Vice City will always be my favorite, looking back, I think the originals were better and I had more fun. But maybe I was just younger ...

[pjmlp]

Well, I remember watching Asteroids as a kid on the coffee place my parents used to hang around, latter replaced by Kung-Fu Master, and to see DYI build your own computer before the Speccy became widspread, guess how old I feel.

[MPSimmons]

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.

[hdgvhicv]

Loved carmageddon, and yes graphics felt far more modern than GTA. Still loved gta eventually though as it was more fun.

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

[Markoff]

it was definitely retro, by the time of GTA1 release there was already Screamer 2 released year ago and Need for speed 3 years prior, though you are right unlike Carmageddon they didnt have pedestrians

[sublinear]

GTA2 was the turning point for the entire series. It boggles my mind how many people don't realize that anymore.

[theodric]

I also played a lot of GTA I and remember wishing it could be an FPV game like Carmageddon was. I eventually got my wish!

[d3Xt3r]

I'm old (ish?), was an avid gamer and grew up on DOS, playing games like GORILLA.BAS, Alley Cat, Dangerous Dave etc. Yet somehow I never played GTA I and II. I did hear about them but none of my friends played it, no one I knew had it in fact, so was never compelled to try it.

GTA III was my first GTA game so for me and my mates, that's when the series began. Not really sure why I and II were so low-key where I lived.

[SapporoChris]

https://www.npr.org/2002/07/09/1146385/grand-theft-auto-iii

If I had heard of GTA games previously, I hadn't really considered playing them because stealing cars just didn't seem interesting. But I remember hearing about GTA3 on NPR and the review made it sound so amazing that I purchased it.

[bartread]

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.

[sedatk]

GTA I was so much fun with friends on LAN despite looking basic at the time.

[colechristensen]

GTA II is still fun for me, I try it about every third year for a week.