Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto is an action game made by DMA Design (later on they changed their name to Rockstar North), the company that also created Body Harvest. The game was released in October 1997 on MS-Dos and Windows, in February 1998 on Playstation and in November 1999 on Gameboy Color.

In Grand Theft Auto you can play in three different cities, but at first you only have one option, Liberty City. This game works different than the GTA's we play nowadays. In this game you have to reach a number of points before you can start the next level. For example, in the first mission you have to score 1 million points. You can do this primarily by completing missions. When you complete a mission you'll get a multiplier so you get twice the amount of points for every action you make. However, when you get caught by the police you'll lose half of your multipliers. In most missions you have to kill someone or get a car from point A to B, but there are more varieties. You don't have to complete all missions, the primary goal is to get points, and it doesn't matter how you achieve them. You can sell cars, kill people, destroy vehicles, and in some levels there is a train track which you can put to good use, as I demonstrate in the movie below.

In this game you have four lives when you start a level. When you die, you'll lose one life, simple. You can regain lives by playing Kill Frenzy's, in which you have to get a certain amount of points within the time limit. You can find these rampages throughout the level. They can appear as guns, but also as tanks and other vehicles.

As mentioned earlier, there is a police force in this game. The funny thing is that they don't mind your bad driving skills. For example, when driving through the red light, they don't chase you, but when you hit their car they will. In this game there are four levels of police displayed in the amount of police heads you see on your screen. When you've got three heads the police will set op roadblocks and shoot at you with pistols, with four heads they'll shoot you with machine guns.

You are able to choose to play as eight characters in the game: Travis, Kat, Nikki, Divine, Bubba, Troy, Kivlov and Ulrika (the PlayStation version only lets players choose the four male characters, however). In actual gameplay, there is no real difference, since the characters all wear the exact same yellow sweater. You may also name your character, which, with the correct name, acts like a cheat code and alters gameplay.

Now, the graphics of this game are well done. When somebody says Grand Theft Auto most people almost directly think of GTA: San Andreas or GTA IV. This game is different. In the year of 1997 they weren't able to create such nice 3D graphics, but these eagle view graphics are done quite well too.

Conclusion: If you always liked the GTA series, but have never played this game you should try it. Now, I'll let you into a secret. This game is free to download on Rockstar's own website, so check it out immediately.