

In the realm of what you do and how you do it, the Definitive Edition games are mostly successful. You get in cars and drive around these miniature cities, shooting enemies or avoiding the police or trying to find all the secret items, much like I did when playing these games for the first time on PlayStation 2. Having played both GTA 3 and Vice City, I can confidently say that the games “feel right,” in the sense that they are clearly designed and sometimes punishingly hard. These things remain relatively unchanged. While GTA 3 borrowed from the crime movies of the ’90s and 2000s, Vice City and San Andreas pulled even more heavily from their inspirational media (coked-up ’80s Miami films and early ’90s American Black cinema, respectively) to the point of parody. At the core, each of the games are doing what they always did: asking you to do crime stuff mission-by-mission as you build a gangster empire. Your ability to enjoy them will rest firmly on your tolerance for 20-year-old game design ideas, the humor of the early 2000s, and the strange graphical updates that developer Grove Street Games have made to the Rockstar classics. These games fused into the spine of the video game worlds that we play in here in 2021, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition has brought them all together in one place, on modern consoles. Grand Theft Auto 3 popularized the action-oriented open worlds that dominate games today Vice City injected an ironic ’80s sensibility and showed that, sometimes, a soundtrack can make a game and San Andreas honed these strategies to create a lived-in story about CJ and his rise to power in the early ’90s.

It is not an overstatement to say we live in a world that Grand Theft Auto has made for us.
