Grand Theft Auto (1997): The Original Top-Down Game

The first Grand Theft Auto is usually remembered as the game that started a franchise. The record from 1997 and 1998 tells a narrower and more interesting story. It was a British release first and an American one four months later, and critics did not agree on how good it was, even within the same outlet. Its publisher also sold the controversy as hard as the game.

This page sets out what the contemporary sources actually say: the release dates, the scores, the money, and the press campaign.

At a glance

What is counted, and how

The launch date is not as settled as it looks. Three contemporary sources give three slightly different answers:

• Campaign, the UK advertising weekly, wrote on Nov 20 1997 that the game "is to launch on November 28."
• A fan-run news page on grandtheftauto.com reported on Nov 30 1997 that UK mail-order buyers had learned Nov 28 was the shipping date, with most shops getting stock on Nov 29.
• GameSpot's Nov 1998 news story said the game "first came out in December of 1997."

We use Nov 28 1997 as the European PC launch because it is the only date given in advance by a trade paper. We give no exact day for the European PlayStation version, because the only source we found for a specific date is a 1997 trade magazine we could not open. A 2019 Vice feature dates the Windows release to October 1997; no 1997 source we found supports that, so we do not use it.

Gaps between releases are simple day counts:

• UK launch (Nov 28 1997) to US PC launch (Mar 24 1998): 116 days.
• UK launch to the GameSpot report of 1 million copies shipped (Nov 16 1998): 353 days.
• UK launch to GTA VI's announced release (Nov 19 2026): 10,583 days, just under 29 years.

Review dates. For reviews listed on the archived GameRankings pages, the dates GameRankings shows for UK magazines (such as 2001 for PC Zone) are when the site added them, not when the magazine printed them. We give a date only where the outlet's own page shows one.

Left out: later lifetime sales totals that appear in secondary sources, because we could not open the original newspaper and business-paper reports they cite.

The setup

You play a criminal at the bottom of a crime organization. Jobs come in through ringing pay phones. Each level sets a points target: GameSpot's PC reviewer said the first level needed one million points, which could take up to two hours, and later levels three million, which could take five to six. GamesRadar's 2008 history counts six levels spread across three cities, Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City.

The view is top-down. GameSpot's PlayStation review noted that the camera pulls back as your car speeds up so you can see further ahead, then zooms in when you slow down or get out on foot.

You could not save partway through a level. Kaiafas at GameSpot wrote that he would have recommended the game more highly if you could.

What the box promised vs what reviewers counted

ASC Games' US launch release gave big round numbers. Reviewers who played the game counted differently.

The vehicle gap is the one real disagreement. Neither source explains how it counted, so we report both numbers.

The marketing: controversy as a launch plan

The game's reputation arrived before the game did. Campaign reported in Nov 1997 that BMG Interactive was using the controversy to sell the game, with help from publicist Max Clifford. The game had already been criticized in the national press and in the House of Lords, which said it might encourage joyriding. BMG's launch plan, per Campaign, included press and radio advertising, a four-week online promotion, and posters in public toilets.

By the US launch, ASC Games listed the controversy as a selling point. Its press release said the House of Lords and the French government had condemned the game and that Brazil had banned it.

Fifteen years later, co-creator Mike Dailly told The Sunday Times (as reported by Game Developer in Oct 2012) that Clifford had planned the outcry and "made it all happen." Co-creator David Jones said the team itself had not designed the game to provoke. Both points can be true: the content came from the developers, and the outrage was managed by the publisher.

Reception

The scores split, and the split is the interesting part.

Two things stand out. First, the same site scored the two versions very differently: GameSpot gave the PC game 6.4 and the PlayStation game 8.0, six weeks apart, by different reviewers. Second, the PC average beat the PlayStation average by about ten points, even though GameSpot preferred the PlayStation version.

GameSpot's PlayStation reviewer singled out the radio: steal a pickup and you hear country, steal a muscle car and you get hard rock, with DJs reading call letters and weather between songs. That idea of a radio station tied to each car runs through every later game; see GTA radio stations.

The money

Take-Two said in Nov 1998 that more than one million PC and PlayStation copies had shipped. The same GameSpot story notes that Take-Two had bought BMG Interactive's assets in March 1998, which is how the game ended up under the company that later published every GTA.

At the ECCSELL awards in Cannes in Feb 1999, which ranked games by 1998 European revenue, Grand Theft Auto took a Gold award at 17 million euro. For scale, here is where it sat among other 1998 winners on the same list:

So GTA was a solid European hit, level with Crash Bandicoot, but well behind the biggest games of its year. For later games see GTA sales history.

Legacy

The first game set up the formula: pay-phone jobs, police attention that grows with your crimes, stolen cars as both transport and score, and radio by vehicle. Its three city names came back in 3D: Liberty City in GTA III, Vice City in GTA: Vice City, and San Andreas as a whole state in GTA: San Andreas. GTA VI, due Nov 19 2026, is set in Vice City, inside the fictional state of Leonida, per Rockstar's own GTA VI pages.

The pitch looked different. Engadget's 2011 report on the original design papers, posted by Dailly, shows a game called Race'n'Chase. It was planned as a multiplayer racing and crashing game, with example cities such as New York, Venice and Miami.

DMA Design became Rockstar North; see Rockstar North history. The expansions came next (London 1969 and 1961), then GTA 2 in 1999.

Rockstar later gave the game away. Its "Rockstar Classics" page, as archived in Jan 2010, offered Grand Theft Auto as free Volume 1 to mailing-list members.

Trivia

• The Game Boy Color version was made by Take-Two's Tarantula studio. Take-Two said in Oct 1999 that it would ship in Europe on Oct 22 1999, the same day as GTA 2, and in North America in November.
• The Herald's diary column noted in Mar 1999 that the game's built-in cheat codes were Scottish in-jokes, one of them a nod to Motherwell. Lead programmer Keith Hamilton explained that the team came from places such as Glasgow, Motherwell, Dundee and Arbroath.
• GameSpot's US launch story described the game as being sold to adults aged 17 and up.

Sources

• Campaign, "BMG plans spree with crime game," Nov 20 1997
• grandtheftauto.com, "Old News - November," Nov 1997
• ASC Games press release, Mar 24 1998
• GameSpot, "Grand Theft Auto Available," Mar 24 1998
• GameSpot PC review, Tasos Kaiafas, Mar 24 1998
• GameSpot PlayStation review, Ryan MacDonald, May 6 1998
• GameRankings, Grand Theft Auto (PC), archived Oct 2011
• GameRankings, Grand Theft Auto (PlayStation), archived 2011
• GameSpot, "Grand Theft Scores a Million," Nov 16 1998
• GameSpot, "ECCSELL Awards Name Winners," Feb 12 1999
• Take-Two press release, Oct 13 1999
• Engadget, "Race'n'Chase: Original GTA design docs posted," Mar 22 2011
• Game Developer, "The man who engineered the Grand Theft Auto controversy," Oct 22 2012
• The Herald, "Diary," Mar 3 1999
• GamesRadar, "The complete history of Grand Theft Auto," Apr 25 2008
• Rockstar Games, "Rockstar Classics," archived Jan 2010
• Vice, "The Oral History of GTA: London," Apr 30 2019
• Rockstar Games, GTA VI site
• Rockstar Newswire, GTA VI release date, Nov 6 2025