Retro Let's Play, Feb 2025: Grand Theft Auto (1997)

Let's play some retro games!



Grand Theft Auto was released in late 1997 initially for MS-DOS, Windows and PlayStation 1, and later in 1999 with an interesting port to GameBoy Color. The game was developed by a company then known as DMA Design, and likewise published by a company then known as Take-Two Interactive, all of which have since been absorbed into the very famous Rockstar North and Rockstar Games development/publishing combo.

The series has gained notoriety today for its expansive open world 3D gaming, and complex character-driven story telling. Over the years the various titles have managed to walk a fine line of deep character analysis mixed with cutting and sometimes very cynical social commentary, but all the while presenting a highly tongue-in-cheek exterior not afraid to revel in stereotypes and nostalgic rose coloured glasses.

But before the dramatic change to 3D in the third title in the series, the first two titles presented a 2D overhead view of the world. Initially being developed as a game called "Race and Chase" where you played a police officer trying to stop criminals, the development team found that too boring. They flipped the script and put the player in the role of the "bad guy", tasked with doing (typically violent and terrible) odd jobs for competing gangs around town. These gangs themselves were in a power struggle with each other, so you as the mercenary criminal for hire were often caught in the middle of these gang wars. You find phone booths scattered around the cities (for my GenZ friends - this was a time before the Internet and before mobile phones, and we had to put physical currency in the shape of small metal circles into standalone landline phones in public spaces to make calls if we were out and about), and use these to receive instructions on what to do next.

Gameplay is frenetic at times, seeing the player stealing cars, collecting weapons, and causing general havoc and chaos. And of course once the police are involved, things only escalate from there. The aim of the game is to complete the jobs, get paid, and progress your way through each of the cities.

While most of the gameplay takes place in the US, two addons were released for the game, both set in London. One in 1969, and one in 1961. And just before the switch to the more familiar full 3D world we know today which began in GTA3, the series would have one more title presented in this overhead view. Simply titled "Grand Theft Auto 2", it featured 3D accelerated graphics for the landscape and buildings, however gameplay was very similar to the original game.

Check out loads of screenshots over at Moby Games, or see the videos at the bottom of this post for more visuals.

Playing the game:

PC Version:

PCMR, whip out your period accurate rigs and fire them up. Grab the installer CD from The Internet Archive, and load up your choice of MS-DOS or Windows 95 native version.

The game lists a 486 DX4 100MHz with 16MB of RAM as the minimum spec, however early Pentium hardware is probably recommended for a smooth experience.

If you don't have original hardware, tools like DOSBox, PCem or 86Box make this a breeze to install. Community patches are available that aim to increase compatibility with modern Windows desktops too:
https://gtaforums.com/topic/860039-grand-theft-auto-max-pack-a-complete-pack-ala-gog/

I'll be giving this a whirl in WINE under Linux and reporting back later in the week. If people struggle with the setup, let me know, and I'll host a virtual disk image up that you can import and play via one of the above mentioned tools.

The PC version also includes multiplayer over either IPX networking or null modem serial link. If any OCAUers either get this working or have played the game in this way previously, please share your experiences! I'm keen to know what this is like as a multi player experience.

PS1 version:

This is a breeze to get working on PS1 emulation, and a great way to play the game with a real arcade style feel if you enjoy using a gamepad. The number one PS1 emulator today is the mighty Duckstation, which you can download for most PCs and phones here:
https://duckstation.org/

Grab it, point it to your GTA1 game ISO, and you're good to go. I'll post a link a little later on to my previous video on getting Duckstation working with pixel-art PS1 games to hopefully help people along with that.

Plenty of other options here too, from original hardware to MiSTer to other emulators. Very simply game to emulate and play, although with the tiny graphics, handheld options might get a little tricky.

Both of the London 1969 and 1961 expansions are available on PS1 as standalone titles.

Gameboy Color:

Again, not a super tricky one. Grab a flash cart and the game image, and play this on a real GameBoy Color or GameBoy Advance (all GBA models except for the "mini" could play GBC games), and play. Alternatively, the GBC can be emulated on just about any hardware that can draw a picture these days, so find your favourite emulator and play. Perfect mobile / toilet / public transport / boring all-staff meeting gaming.

Longplay videos:

PC Version:



PS1 version:



BBC article interviewing the developers of the game:

 

PS1 DuckStatoion users: emulating the game is pretty straight forward. Download DuckStation, download the ISO, point one at the other and play.

However playing games of this era designed for old CRT TVs on modern systems can make them look a little odd. Luckily Duckstation has a tonne of options around PS1 visuals, from the ability to upscale pixel and 3D graphics separately, to enabling or disabling the classic PS1 "wobbly polygons", as well as all sorts of CRT shaders and upscaling filters to satisfy people who want either razor sharp pixels or soften edges.

I put a video together a while back for "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night", a classic 2D PS1 title with a handful of 3D elements, and a great showcase for how to deal with pixel art and/or mixed pixel-art and 3D polygon gaming. Check it out if you need some pointers on where to look to play around with the many visual features Duckstation has to offer:

 

Great choice!

It definitely was, I had a DX4-100 specced the same at the time and it was a bit of a battle. My uncle's P166/32MB was a much nicer experience
We used to multi it over IPX with a couple of other rigs (this was at high school, before good network security) - it worked quite well, always fun trying to Gouranga each other.

 

Shout out to Mistikal for recommending it in the nominations thread.

 

My childhood on my 486 PC.

Very into it.

 

i was just thinking about installing gta, gta london and gta 2 on the steam deck if i ever wanted a whirl. they also had GTA Chinatown Wars!

ive still got the box but sadly not the cd as i lent it to someone and never got it back.

 

I remember playing London once, but could never find the disc for it growing up!

 

I really enjoyed Chinatown Wars because it was such a cool throwback to GTA 1 and 2.

I played it mostly on Nintendo DS, but I hear the PSP version was really good. That's probably perfect for playing on SteamDeck.

 

I had a blast playing GTA when it first came out. I dont think I ever completed it, but it was a bit of fun and very frantic at times!

I grabbed a copy and had a bit of a play earlier; my gosh, the controls and the interface! things have developed so far since this game. I had big problems with the zoom in/out whilst playing and ended up exiting because of it.

Great trip down memory lane.

 

I dunno, i was never really into it, my first real exposure to GTA was Vice City, every time i load up GTA 1, i feel like I am playing an expanded version of "The last V8" on the C64.


(Last V8 C64)

Ill try and give the real GTA another go this month, hopefully ill see/feel the difference. Thanks for the writeup Elvis, nice job.

 

Ha, I don't remember this game being so full of bugs. I think I've been stuck between a car and a building about three times now and had to restart the game.

And I STILL don't know where the hell that cab is out on the docks. I drive around in circles for 15 minutes or so looking for it, just to then try and hoof it on foot, take a wrong turn, and end up in the river.

This game could really do with an onscreen map.

[edit]

And I didn't realise this had native 3dfx support! DOSBox-X worked with minimal effort, however I couldn't get it to scale past native res. So the game only ran in a tiny window on my 2880x1800 screen.

So I went through the effort of getting 86box up and running with 3dfx, and despite being a little painful, it's working swimmingly now.

I'll test that image in Windows a little later on, slap some instructions together, then host it up if other people want to try it out.

 

I’ve got the opposite issue, it’s spawning at 640*480 full screen, so it’s looks crazy big. I’ll need to have a look what’s going on there..

 

That should be normal for this game, if you're running DOS mode. It'll be Voodoo1 only, 640x480 locked.

I'm on Linux, and apparently the internal virtual Voodoo card in DOSBox-X can't scale with SDL screen drawing, which kinda sucks. Hence my migration over to 86Box which can do virtual Voodoo1 and scale the image to fullscreen. I haven't tried any Passthrough stuff with DOSBox-X yet though.

This game is actually the perfect candidate for SoftGPU, with Win95 + Glide:
https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/softgpu-accelerated-3d-for-windows-95-98-me-vms.1346988/

So I'm going to try that out later too.

 

I still remember playing the hell out of this back in the day and then was simply gobsmacked at the evolution from this to GTA2, the lighting in particular was kind of amazing back then.

Just like most people (I assume) I pretty much just drove around and did basically no missions, haha. I should rectify that.

Great choice to put this one up elvis

 

That's definitely how I did it back in the day. I'm trying to more diligently finish off missions this time around, but damn it's tough.

 

This takes me back to the late 90s on the P100. Great game I still play from time to time.

 

I've built an 86Box image with 3dfx/Voodoo enabled graphics if people want to get this running quickly.

Steps to make it work:

1) Download 86Box for your preferred OS. I'm using Linux, but I'll assume folks are Windows users for this (will work on any supported platform though):
* https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases/latest

2) Make a folder and extract 86Box into it. You should have "86Box.exe" and the dll files it uses directly in that folder.

3) Grab my image and config here:
* https://stickfreaks.com/ocau/gta/86box_gta.7z

4) Extract said image into the same folder as your 86Box contents.

5) Grab the CD image from the Internet Archive. You can direct download if you like, although they host a torrent for this which is often much faster, as they throttle downloads larger than 100MB:
* https://archive.org/details/GrandTheftAuto_201903

6) There are two files that need to go into the same folder as "86Box.exe" and my image/config files:
* GrandTheftAuto.bin
* GrandTheftAuto.cue

These are a bin/cue pair of files. This is similar to ISO, but because the game uses a multi-track CD, it can't be in ISO format (which is only single track). The "cue" sheet contains the metadata on how the different tracks are defined within the "bin" image. 86Box can use these together.

7) Once you have...
* 86Box.exe
* My image/configs
* The game CD bin/cue

... all in one folder, you're ready to go. Just double-click "86Box.exe" and it will start the virtual machine.

It'll fire up the FreeDOS install I have on there, select the right memory configuration, jump into the GTA DOS install folder where I've configured it for 3dfx/Voodoo acceleration, and run the "GTAFX.EXE" game launcher to get it working.

The VM has been configured as a
* Pentium 133MHz
* 32MB RAM
* Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 main video card
* Voodoo 1 4MB secondary video card
* Soundblaster 16

The game uses a combination of WAV files and CD audio, so no fancy midi/FM stuff is required. 86Box itself is all software accelerated, so you don't need anything crazy to handle the 3D.

I have selected "Vulkan" just as the scaling output though, but that's just to scale the game's native 640x480 graphics up to whatever your desktop resolution is if you either maximise or run fullscreen.

I've only included the bare bones ROMs needed to make that exact setup work. If you want to enable joysticks or something, let me know, and I'll link the necessary repos to add that hardware to 86Box.

 

I put sooooo many hours into GTa1 back in the day. I think with a long enough run up, the tanker is the fastest thing in the game.

I ran it on my dad’s P2 300. Graphics by S3. Trio 3D I think

 

Thanks Elvis. Will give it a spin. So many memories.
Can’t remember if it was 1 or 2 (or both) which has lots of secret areas and jumps. Was always a thrill to find them

 

The "Grand Theft Auto" vocal when you start/respawn from death is forever burned into my brain.