Having taken their flagship franchise to a new height in 2001, Rockstar gave its most important game, Grand Theft Auto III, two alternative 'flavors' in the three years that followed. First was the "Scarface"-inflected Vice City, then the "Boyz n the Hood"-playground, San Andreas.
The time periods and specific settings of those two games find me at different perspectives of understanding and experience. Vice City (another favorite) is the unhinged caricature of 1980s Miami - a world I was never alive for. San Andreas paints early 90s LA, which trails my birth and childhood.
This feels closer, personally, to my sensibilities and tastes. Vice City is alien to me, but so deeply valuable as a distorted window into a world with excessive, yet endearing qualities. My generation probably knew Vice City before we knew Miami Vice, in all honesty. And its right for our generation to do so, as we had those amazing fake radio stations to transport us right into the driver's seat, journeying to a cocaine empire. And with that, Rockstar (as they always do) looked into the well of movies and TV shows that they love.
This time, instead of zooming down the beachside at night with humidity and neon lights surrounding you, they looked to hood classics, B movies, John Singleton, F. Gary Gray, Hughes Brothers, early Tarantino, etc.
It was a game that felt like cruising down a neighborhood street during the orange sunset, surrounded by your homies. Music's blasting out the radio and into the voices of the disenfranchised community out in the sidewalk, with a world of danger just barely out of sight.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does exactly what Rockstar was setting out to do, which is place the player in a sandbox, to follow a deeply derivative, but sincere loveletter of a narrative, while exploring and admiring the details of their funhouse mirror of South Central LA and its surrounding regions.
It set out to be crass, and, if we're being honest, childish (even as its being adult). It wanted to be massive - a monument to the firepower of the system it was on, and a mic drop on how to tear the walls down on limitations. I don't know if it set out to be timeless, and perhaps being a period piece is part of its design, but as document of the sensibilities of both the early 90s and early 2000s, it's invaluable. It gave talents like Samuel L. Jackson, Charlie Murphy, and others, a chance to be even more animated and comic as iconic characters that revel in being juvenile for the sake of utter fun. Did it set out to be a lightning rod for controversy? In some ways, perhaps. In other ways, probably not. But it aided in its visibility, and the name San Andreas probably registers almost as iconic as Gotham City.
It succeeded in being the new (at the time), most ambitious Grand Theft Auto game: a game where crime and debauchery is the objective, and satire and homage are embedded in a celebration of lawlessness. It was the newest flavor of their tried and tested formula - more robust and layered than its predecessors (though the other ones before it have their fans as well, naturally).
It was capturing the feeling of driving in a droptop lowrider with three of your friends, music from the radio blasting out the speakers, orange sun beating down on you through the smog, taking in a city you called home, with the dangers of a harsh reality of living just barely within reach...
The time periods and specific settings of those two games find me at different perspectives of understanding and experience. Vice City (another favorite) is the unhinged caricature of 1980s Miami - a world I was never alive for. San Andreas paints early 90s LA, which trails my birth and childhood.
This feels closer, personally, to my sensibilities and tastes. Vice City is alien to me, but so deeply valuable as a distorted window into a world with excessive, yet endearing qualities. My generation probably knew Vice City before we knew Miami Vice, in all honesty. And its right for our generation to do so, as we had those amazing fake radio stations to transport us right into the driver's seat, journeying to a cocaine empire. And with that, Rockstar (as they always do) looked into the well of movies and TV shows that they love.
This time, instead of zooming down the beachside at night with humidity and neon lights surrounding you, they looked to hood classics, B movies, John Singleton, F. Gary Gray, Hughes Brothers, early Tarantino, etc.
It was a game that felt like cruising down a neighborhood street during the orange sunset, surrounded by your homies. Music's blasting out the radio and into the voices of the disenfranchised community out in the sidewalk, with a world of danger just barely out of sight.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does exactly what Rockstar was setting out to do, which is place the player in a sandbox, to follow a deeply derivative, but sincere loveletter of a narrative, while exploring and admiring the details of their funhouse mirror of South Central LA and its surrounding regions.
It set out to be crass, and, if we're being honest, childish (even as its being adult). It wanted to be massive - a monument to the firepower of the system it was on, and a mic drop on how to tear the walls down on limitations. I don't know if it set out to be timeless, and perhaps being a period piece is part of its design, but as document of the sensibilities of both the early 90s and early 2000s, it's invaluable. It gave talents like Samuel L. Jackson, Charlie Murphy, and others, a chance to be even more animated and comic as iconic characters that revel in being juvenile for the sake of utter fun. Did it set out to be a lightning rod for controversy? In some ways, perhaps. In other ways, probably not. But it aided in its visibility, and the name San Andreas probably registers almost as iconic as Gotham City.
It succeeded in being the new (at the time), most ambitious Grand Theft Auto game: a game where crime and debauchery is the objective, and satire and homage are embedded in a celebration of lawlessness. It was the newest flavor of their tried and tested formula - more robust and layered than its predecessors (though the other ones before it have their fans as well, naturally).
It was capturing the feeling of driving in a droptop lowrider with three of your friends, music from the radio blasting out the speakers, orange sun beating down on you through the smog, taking in a city you called home, with the dangers of a harsh reality of living just barely within reach...