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.
Multi Theft Auto
The first version of "Multi Theft Auto", dubbed "Grand Theft Auto III: Alternative Multiplayer", attempted to fill in this gap by extending an already existing cheating tool with functionality that allowed the game to be played with a very crude form of two-player racing over a computer network purely as a proof of concept, similar to how the now-defunct XBAND service worked by manipulating game memory in order to add online multiplayer functionality. Newer versions of "Multi Theft Auto" with increasingly better gameplay and other improvements were released based on the same concept of game manipulation, by a small team of developers.