We’re inching ever closer to GTA 6’s release, and our minds have been rather preoccupied with thoughts of all the things we’re going to do first in Leonidas City when we finally get to begin exploring it as Jason and Lucia. Of course, many of our thoughts have taken us back not just to GTA 5, but to games as early as the franchise’s 1999 outing.
GTA 2 might not seem like an obvious comparison point to Rockstar’s upcoming flagship, but look beyond Leonida’s sprawling streets and that immersive visual style, and you begin to see underpinnings in the game’s design and core gameplay that have now become a standard for the games that followed it.
It brought a very distinctive gameplay loop and a lasting appeal that were quite unique for their time, although subsequent entries in the franchise have aged its mechanics out by quite a bit. Still, those common points are a great subject for an examination of how the franchise has managed to remain as dominant as it has over the years.
It’s off to Anywhere City, which is also where our conversation begins.
A City Like No Other
You might think calling Anywhere City a rarity seems far-fetched after all the great ones in subsequent franchise titles, but as an early showcase of the distinct vibe that accompanies a GTA game, there’s nothing quite like it. It’s literally timeless, as you probably know from all the conversations about when it’s actually set.
Opinions give us a time frame that goes from as early as 1999 to 2013, conversations sparked by a deliberate ambiguity baked into the game’s own sources, and a design language that blended familiar elements with futuristic ones to present a world that felt unique while still feeling lived-in and accessible.
Of course, the game’s original manual (really wish we still had those on new games) talks of a city that’s crumbling under the strain of corporate apathy and criminal exploitation, two ends of a spectrum that you navigate quite often via the gameplay loop on offer. Anywhere City’s distinct districts and the even spread of jobs all around them meant you could see shifts in the decor as you went between them, lending variety and immersion to the experience.
Of course, a city’s streets are only interesting to video game players if there are enough things to do while you explore them. Thankfully, GTA 2’s clever approach to keeping you busy is among its strengths, and is now the early blueprint of a gameplay loop that has often baked chaos into its very fundamentals over the years.
People Pleasing Perfection
The Gang Respect system is part of GTA 2’s allure, and a great way of making its streets feel like you’re navigating a hostile world where competing factions can often cause your own efforts to achieve your goals to meet unintended consequences.
Anywhere City could very well have been called Anything City, considering how unpredictable your jobs for one faction or the other could get. An early-game mission involving the interrogation of an enemy faction member comes to mind. Picking up the unwitting and unfortunate man, while scaring more than a few pedestrians on the way to ramp up our multipliers as we made it to a destination, was part of the fun. Of course, your pockets could already be full based on how many other jobs you’ve done at the time, with the potential of an even bigger payout hinged on the success of the current job.
That trip to the gang’s HQ with our passenger in tow comes with a subsequent objective to deliver the vehicle we were using to a nearby car crusher, passenger included. A simple enough, if rather morbid, end to a job could somehow turn into a full-blown chase if you happen to nick a cop car when attempting a sharp turn, and it all can go downhill pretty quickly from there.
You could end up with no cash left, but a lot of fun memories of evasions and maneuvers that seemed so cool for a game at the time. That’s an undercurrent that has stayed with the franchise over the years, and Anywhere City is an interesting look at how things played out in its early iterations.
Of course, the missions themselves came with enough variety to keep the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting, although there are only so many variations of drive between point A and point B that any game can carry. That mission involving the snitch was accompanied by a series of textbook jobs involving deliveries of the illegal kind, and a few robberies before a full-blown gang war comes your way.
However, a bevy of other objectives helped keep things fresh, although how effective they were at staving off the monotony of repetition is something that’s going to vary from player to player.
That’s where things get interesting. You see, helping one gang over another meant being locked out of jobs and more earning potential, a facet that was quite important to in-game progression. Of course, that also meant the potential for more chaos through interactions with rival gang members on the streets, and even the aforementioned mission, which involved stealing a van, picking up some reinforcements, and driving to the location for a shootout.
Of course, gang wars and crimes are only part of the appeal.
All Roads Lead To Chaos
Anywhere City was a world in which chaos formed a part of daily life when GTA 2 was in play. Traffic collisions could result in holdups and even conflict with irate NPCs, and we’ve talked about how that collision with a cop car brought an unexpected end to an otherwise straightforward set of goals.
That the chaos you cause as you make your way between objectives is rewarded in the form of a cash multiplier, showcasing how the game’s design itself leans towards you being a complete disruption to a world in which other disruptions were just waiting to interact with yours to present the grand illusion of a disrupted order. It’s the kind of game where you stop a car in the middle of something important just because another one looked interesting. Several of those carjacking attempts might often lead to further chaos, caused by either gang members coming in to get you, or the police looking to get another criminal off the streets. Anywhere City was a place that reacted to your actions, and did that often enough for them to matter.
An area where that unpredictability becomes a tangible part of the experience is when you’re running from the police. The enemy AI on offer can seem quite easy to fool by today’s standards, but when you think about how relentless the police could seem when they were out in force to apprehend you at the time, things are different.
Cop cars could chase you down and even try to head you off at junctions. Even switching cars after killing the cops sent to nab you doesn’t help sometimes. You could be speeding away from the scene thinking you’re in the clear, only for another cop car that happened to witness the crime to follow you with renewed zeal. Things like that can throw you off your game and force errors in an experience that might otherwise seem routine on the surface.
It’s also where we began to think about the game’s limitations.
Anywhere’s Underbelly
Let’s begin with the overhead perspective. It was really cool at the time, no doubt about it. But when you consider how it was placing a sort of distance-based barrier between the world and the player in comparison to where we’re at with the franchise today, it’s a feature that’s best relegated to the fast-travel animation.
The camera perspective is a detail that might not have seemed as impersonal as it does today at the time of GTA 2’s release, but we believe it’s a part of the game that hasn’t aged well. When we think about pursuits and shootouts today, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a top-down perspective is going to be fun unless it’s from the point of view of a press or police chopper that’s showcasing some of our finest work.
There’s also the approach to progression that might have been par for the course when games were grindy as part of their charm, but it definitely doesn’t work today. Losing all your hard-earned cash after a string of successes was devastating enough, but with repetition being a huge part of the game’s weaknesses, that could mean its gameplay loop could begin to feel stale after a few failures.
But, like we’ve said before, the presentation and the way side content was woven into the core gameplay loop are interesting not just because of their relative effectiveness, but because of how they show how the franchise was already moving in a direction where those disparate systems would begin to collide in ways that didn’t just address repetition, but nearly eliminated it from the equation, as evidenced by Rockstar’s work over the past two decades.
GTA 2 already had Rockstar’s distinct humor, shown in the way mission briefings were tinged with little puns and references, while the writing often came with dialogue that would incite a chuckle. That’s now been taken to new heights since then, and Anywhere’s distinct vibe has become a design philosophy that has led many of the worlds that followed it to take the open-world genre forward in interesting ways.
But as a part of a franchise that has historically emphasized player freedom, reactive streets, and unpredictably escalating chaos, GTA 2 stands as a worthy beacon of the franchise’s future success, and a testament to how its strengths and weaknesses have guided the franchise over the years.
It’s going to be interesting to see what the latest distillation of its formula looks like in GTA 6, and we’re happy that we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
