Today is the 26 year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 2.
The Most Forgotten Grand Theft Auto Ever?
As we all know, Grand Theft Auto III was the game that put the franchise and its genre on the map, even if the first games before it were also successful.
While some fans will cite the original Grand Theft Auto as a noteworthy game in its own right, where does this place Grand Theft Auto 2?
If you take a quick look, things are not so favorable. Review scores for the game at the time were very poor, considerably less than the first game or the London expansions.
A Strange Departure That Rockstar Turned Back On Almost Immediately
The game takes a strange turn that Rockstar never went back to. It jumped from the modern day setting of the original game to a retrofuturistic city simply called Anywhere City. You played Claude Speed, a career criminal who may as well be a blank slate.
Reviewers disliked the setting change, but only because Rockstar doesn’t do anything with it. With the Houser brothers and Leslie Benzies learning their trade, they did not give this game a story!
But that may be a good thing.
Why Grand Theft Auto 2 Is A Necessary Step Forward
While Grand Theft Auto 2 had no story, and looked horrible on PlayStation (16 color palette vs. the full 256 color palette available on Windows), it still brought landmark changes that would be carried over to Grand Theft Auto III.
For example, it was the first game that let you choose any mission in any order that you wanted. This meant you could choose to prioritize working for some crime syndicates over others, or try to play with all of them.
And that takes us to its biggest innovation. There was a respect system which indicated what reputation you had with each syndicate. If you wanted to play each of them off of each other, you had to maintain that reputation for all of them.
Aside from this, Grand Theft Auto 2 brought some QOL changes modern players can take for granted today. For example, there was Rockstar’s signature Wanted system, and side missions like driving taxis.
It even added a system for you to save easily by going into a church to donate money. As you can imagine, the original game before it could have been a pain to play.
Where Can You Play Grand Theft Auto 2 Now?
It’s strange to mark this anniversary today, as Rockstar has not officially distributed Grand Theft Auto 2 for roughly a decade. For a while, Grand Theft Auto 1+2 were on Steam, and then Rockstar offered them as free downloads on their site.
The first Grand Theft Auto was last distributed in the 2018 PlayStation Classic. As ill-fated as that mini console was, the objectively better Grand Theft Auto 2 did not join its library.
These games were also not part of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. Maybe that would have been for the best.
There are DRM-free Windows versions of the games out there now if you know where to look. But we think there’s an ideal situation where this game could get updates to run on modern platforms to this day, run by developers who will give it the care and attention it deserves.
If you’d like to see that happen, maybe you can nudge them along here.
