Grand Theft Auto (video game)
Grand Theft Auto is an action-adventure video game developed by DMA Design and published by BMG Interactive. It was first released in Europe and North America in October 1997 for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was later re-released on 12 December 1997 in Europe and 30 June 1998 in North America for the PlayStation. It is the first instalment of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, to be followed by 1999's "Grand Theft Auto 2". The series, which has led to five main entries and several special edition games over 16 years, has sold more than 150 million units as of September 2013. The story follows a group of criminals in three fictionalised versions of US cities as they perform bank robberies, assassinations, and other illegal activities for their respective crime syndicates.
Grand Theft Auto clone
Games of this type are sometimes defined under the broader terminology "open world games" or "sandbox games". However, many games that predate "Grand Theft Auto III", such as "Metroid" from 1986, are also called open world games. Conflictingly, games such as "Grand Theft Auto III" and "Body Harvest" are credited with inventing this genre more than a decade later. Furthermore, reviewers have stated that this genre does not include every game with a freely explorable world and that this genre is much more specific, thus excluding the free-roaming titles "Spider-Man 2" and "" from this class of games. The terminology is inconsistent, sometimes including any game with open level design, while other times focusing on a specific genre created at the turn of the century.