Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto is the 1997 game that started the series, a top-down crime sandbox developed by DMA Design in Dundee. You play a nameless criminal taking jobs from payphones across three cities that will sound familiar: Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City.

There is no story to speak of, only a points target to hit before the next city unlocks.

What Playing the First GTA Is Actually Like

The camera sits high above the streets and the whole city is drawn from that one angle. You steal a car, take a job from a ringing payphone, and cause enough chaos to build a score multiplier. Missions are short, the police escalate fast, and dying costs you a life rather than restarting a chapter. It plays far closer to an arcade game than to anything the series became later.

Three Cities That Became the Whole Franchise

Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City all appear here first, as flat grids rather than the worlds they would become. Their names carried forward into GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, and Rockstar has treated them as the same fictional geography ever since. The 1997 map is the earliest sketch of a universe that now spans nearly thirty years.

The Original Controversy

The game was built to provoke, and it worked. Press campaigns leaned into the outrage, several countries debated bans, and Brazil blocked it outright. That reputation is a large part of why the name broke out of gaming and into the news, and it set the tone for how every later GTA would be received.

Can You Still Play It Today?

There is no modern re-release. The original is not part of GTA: The Trilogy, it is not sold on current storefronts, and most people who revisit it do so through fan preservation projects or old PC copies. If you are curious about where the series began, expect a genuine 1997 game rather than a remaster.