Have you ever heard Ken Levine talk about the act of jacking a car in GTA 3? Probably not one you had on your bingo card for today.
“It’s actually a very complex task,” he told the fantastic Irrational Games podcast back in 2010. “You’ve got to run, you’ve got to keep up next to the car, you’ve got to open the door, you’ve got to pull the person out, you’ve got to get in and close the door behind you. Back in the Looking Glass days, I think if we were to do something like that, it would be like, ‘Press the Shift, Y key or X key to run. Press O to open the door. Press Alt+P to pull the guy out. Press G to get in the car.’ Whereas in GTA 3, you hit the triangle key, and that whole thing happens.”
In other words, Rockstar figured out what we wanted to do in advance, and made it easy for us to pull it off. “That ability to interpret your actions basically made you forget about all that complexity and just focus on the depth of the game,” Levine said. “And you get there without giving up the things that give a player a huge amount of choice. That’s hard to do.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) – Official Trailer Watch on YouTube
It’s tempting to characterise this moment as a noughties sea change in game design – one that ushered in the multi-platform era and paved the way for the likes of BioShock, which aimed to reduce the complexity of classic computer games without sacrificing their depth. But the truth is, GTA had been doing this since the ’90s. While Irrational was working on System Shock 2, the original Grand Theft Auto launched on PC and PlayStation. In it, you could press Enter and watch your avatar perambulate to the nearest vehicle, toss out its occupant, and clamber inside.