GTA Advance (2004): The Game Boy Advance GTA III Prequel

Grand Theft Auto Advance for Game Boy Advance: who made it after two failed tries, why it slipped a year, what it changed, and how critics split.

Grand Theft Auto Advance is the GTA most fans have never played. It is a top-down handheld game set in GTA III's Liberty City and written as a prequel to it. It was made by an outside studio, Digital Eclipse, after two earlier attempts at a Game Boy Advance GTA fell apart.

Its timing explains a lot about how it was received. According to the people who made it, Rockstar held the finished game back about a year so it could launch alongside GTA: San Andreas. It did launch the same month as San Andreas, and it was easy to miss.

At a glance


Developer	Digital Eclipse, Emeryville, California (Time Extension)
Publisher	Rockstar Games (GameSpot)
Platform	Game Boy Advance
North American release	Oct 26 2004 (GameSpot; Metacritic)
European release	Oct 29 2004 (Eurogamer)
Setting	Liberty City, before the events of GTA III (Time Extension; GameSpot)
Protagonist	Mike, a criminal looking for whoever killed his partner Vinnie (GameSpot)
Rating	ESRB Mature (GameSpot)
Metascore	68 from 33 critics (Metacritic)

What is counted, and how

The name. GameSpot and Metacritic both list the game simply as "Grand Theft Auto" on Game Boy Advance. Eurogamer lists it as "Grand Theft Auto Advance." We use the longer name because it is how the game is usually told apart from the 1997 original.

The setting year. Some fan references give a specific year one year before GTA III. None of the sources we opened state a year, so we say only that it is set before GTA III.

Sales. There is no official figure. The only number we found is an estimate by producer and writer James Stanley, reported by Time Extension in 2023, of roughly 200,000 units in the first year. That is one developer's memory, not a publisher figure. Take-Two's annual report for the year ending Oct 31 2004 lists "certain" products released that year. It names San Andreas and a Game Boy Advance licensed game, Codename: Kids Next Door, but not GTA Advance. Take-Two's fourth-quarter results release does not mention it either.

Day counts: GTA 2's release (Oct 22 1999) to GTA Advance (Oct 26 2004) is 1,831 days, just over five years without a new top-down GTA. The original August 2003 deadline to the October 2004 release is about 14 months.

How it got made

Time Extension's 2023 making-of piece interviewed Digital Eclipse president Mika Mika, producer and writer James Stanley, lead artist Dan Schallock, and Susan Cummings, then a development manager at Rockstar New York. Their account lays out a long road:

When	What happened	Source
May 2001	New Jersey publisher Destination Software takes the rights to a Game Boy Advance GTA III from Take-Two. The project stalls.	Time Extension
Before 2002	UK studio Crawfish Interactive works on a GBA prequel under Rockstar's guidance, set a few months before GTA III.	Time Extension
2002	Crawfish closes. An attempt to revive the project at Climax Studios is dropped.	Time Extension
After 2002	Cummings suggests Digital Eclipse, a studio with handheld experience. Rockstar asks for an original, story-led game.	Time Extension
Aug 2003	Original deadline; the team crunched heavily.	Time Extension
2003-2004	Release pushed back about a year for marketing reasons, to tie in with San Andreas. Rockstar pays the team monthly to fix bugs.	Time Extension
Oct 2004	San Andreas released on PS2 "in late October."	Take-Two 10-K and Q4 release
Oct 26 2004	GTA Advance released in North America.	GameSpot; Metacritic
Oct 29 2004	GTA Advance released in Europe.	Eurogamer

Mika and Schallock told Time Extension that Digital Eclipse started from scratch. They said they reused no code, art or story from the earlier attempts.

On the technical side, Rockstar's Jamie King wanted a fully 3D game. Digital Eclipse judged that impossible on the hardware. Programmer Cathryn Mataga built a "2.5D" system: buildings are angled, texture-mapped 3D shapes under a fixed camera, and everything else is sprites. Story scenes use comic-style talking heads in place of cutscenes.

The setup

GameSpot's review sets up the opening, and Worth Playing and Cubed3 describe it the same way. Mike and his partner Vinnie are about to leave town with a pile of money when the escape goes wrong and Vinnie is killed by a car bomb. Mike sets out to find who did it. Time Extension adds that three GTA III characters return: Asuka Kasen, 8-Ball and King Courtney. Mika told Time Extension the premise came from Rockstar's senior staff; Stanley wrote the missions and dialogue.

Time Extension calls it the only 2D game officially in GTA III's continuity. See GTA universes for how the series splits its continuities, and Liberty City for the city across eras.

Old view, new rules

GameSpot's Gerstmann described the game as the look of the first GTA with the conventions of GTA III. His review gives the details:

Element	GTA (1997)	GTA Advance (2004)
Camera	Top-down, pulls back as you speed up (GameSpot 1998)	Top-down, pulls back with speed but "doesn't pull back far enough"
City	Three cities (GamesRadar)	Liberty City only, the GTA III setting
Side missions	Not mentioned in the 1998 reviews we used	Vigilante, taxi and paramedic missions, which GameSpot says were "introduced in GTA III", plus races
Collectibles	Not mentioned in the 1998 reviews we used	100 hidden packages; every tenth adds an item to your hideout
Saving	No saving inside a level (GameSpot PC 1998)	Save at your hideout
Story scenes	Not covered by our 1998 sources	Two large static character portraits with text
Audio	Radio stations with DJs (GameSpot 1998)	Almost no speech; music by car type
Crashes	Not covered by our 1998 sources	Cars can now flip over

His complaints were the story, the plain dialogue, a stuttering frame rate that killed the sense of speed, and the short camera pull-back. He ended by pointing curious players to Rockstar's website, where the original game was free to download in full. Rockstar's archived Classics page confirms the free offer.

Reception

Metacritic gives 68 from 33 critics: 13 positive, 16 mixed and 4 negative. The spread is unusually wide for one game.

Outlet	Score
Next Level Gaming	90 (Metacritic)
IGN	85 (Metacritic)
GameZone	84 (Metacritic)
Nintendojo	82 (Metacritic)
PALGN	80 (Metacritic)
GameSpot (Jeff Gerstmann, Oct 26 2004)	6.5/10
Eurogamer	6/10
1UP	6/10 (GameSpot critic list)
Worth Playing (Kris Graft, Jan 10 2005)	6/10
Thunderbolt	4/10 (GameSpot critic list)
GMR Magazine	40 (Metacritic)

The gap from 90 to 40 is 50 points. Our reading of the excerpts is that the split follows what each reviewer compared the game to. Nintendojo's blurb treats it as the long-awaited GTA on a Nintendo handheld. GMR's says it expected "a faithful and compelling GTA adventure" and came away disappointed. Judged as a handheld game it scored well. Judged as a GTA released the same month as San Andreas, it did not.

Mika told Time Extension it is "funny now" to see younger players discover the game. For how it ranks against the rest of the series, see GTA review scores.

Legacy

For the series' later top-down handheld game, see Chinatown Wars. GTA Advance sits between the 2D era of GTA 1997 and GTA 2 and the 3D era it is written into.

It is also a case study in a decision that rarely gets talked about: holding a finished game back so it does not stand alone. Rockstar's reason, according to the developers, was marketing. Released next to San Andreas, it shared the month with what Take-Two's CEO called the largest launch in the company's history.

Trivia

Digital Eclipse worried an M rating would keep the game off some retailers' shelves. Mika told Time Extension that a Rockstar contact, whom he could not name, brushed the worry aside and told the team to keep the adult content.
Stanley told Time Extension he added the racing missions late in development. It is his only game writing credit, per the article.
GameSpot noted that the box included a fold-out paper map of Liberty City. It could not show objectives, so Gerstmann found it useless.