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
"Grand Theft Auto III" took the gameplay foundation of the first two "Grand Theft Auto" games and expanded it into a 3D world, and offered an unprecedented variety of minigames and side-missions. The title was a much greater commercial success than its direct precursors, and its influence was profound. As such, "Grand Theft Auto III" is credited with popularizing this genre, let alone inventing it. Its release is sometimes treated as a revolutionary event in the history of video games, much like the release of "Doom" nearly a decade earlier. GamePro called it the most important game of all time, and claimed that every genre was influenced to rethink their conventional level design. IGN similarly praised it as one of the top ten most influential games of all time. Subsequent games that follow this formula of driving and shooting in a free-roaming level have been called "Grand Theft Auto" clones.