I can’t name the year when GTA Vice City came out, and I’m too lazy to go online and check it, but I can tell you the story. So, GTA Vice City came out when I was in school. If I remember it right, it was the end of spring – the beginning of summer. I was going to spend the summer at my grandpa’s place. And there was no PC there. But my grandpa bought me CDs occasionally, so on returning home, I could play some brand new video games.
That summer, the choice was pretty darn hard. It was either GTA Vice City, and I saw somebody in the store playing it instead of working, and it looked damn awesome for its time. In fact, I remember the gameplay very vividly. It was the mission where you have to drive a booby-trapped limo with a rock band in the back (Love Fist, if I remember it correctly). I saw only a glimpse of it, but it was enough for me to want to play this game. Or the other game was Enter the Matrix. Coats, mirrored shades, kung-fu, gunfights, elementary school kind of philosophy, and one big Nokia commercial – the Matrix. And I’ll write about it the next time.
I wanted to play both games. Vice City because I spent a lot of time causing havoc in GTA 3, plus saw its gameplay, and it was magnificent. And Enter the Matrix because it was a motherfucking Matrix, alright? If you grew up when Matrix was huge, you didn’t question how retarded it really was. You embraced it. Finally, I had to go with GTA Vice City because it was two CDs against four in Enter the Matrix.
So, I landed at my grandpa’s place with no PC but with a GTA Vice City CD. Also, it wasn’t bad at all since I had PS One and lots of games to play… so, all in all, I had a kick-ass summer, too bad when you realize that good old times have passed you already thirty, the world is a scary place, and you gradually find the true meaning behind MASH opening theme (for those who don’t know, the main theme of this legendary anti-war series is Suicide is Painless). And maybe one or two video game magazines (yeah, those were the thing when the internet wasn’t as widespread as it is now) where GTA was the main hero. I read. Re-read. Looked at the screenshots. Imagine how cool it was to play it.
Fast forward three months. I came home. First thing first, I got my hands on a PC. Installed GTA. Ran it. And I was lost. Completely. The graphics were better, the controls were better, the cars drove better, the sounds were better, the weapon response was better, the AI was better, the hero could crouch (in one place, and you used it only once throughout the game, but still), there were motorcycles, planes, helicopters, and the hero finally spoke (little did I know, in fifteen years or so, I was going to wish they were mute protagonists). And I’m positively sure at least half of the things I’ve mentioned were only in my mind.
Now, since I was a dumb kid who knew shit about life and barely knew English (for those who didn’t get it yet, I’m not illiterate, I’m just not a native speaker… still illiterate thought) the plot, the references, the dialogues, the classic 80s mob-movie atmosphere… nothing made sense. I started to appreciate all the trademark Rockstar humor a bit later. For now, I appreciated all the gameplay mechanics. I enjoyed riding a bike… and crashing it at every given opportunity. Every bridge was a potential suicide location, since the hero still didn’t know how to swim, and I didn’t know how to drive.
As it usually happened with every GTA game in my life (except GTA 4 and GTA 5), I abused cheat codes from the start. I opened all weapons (and now, instead of one cheat code, you had three with three different load-outs, my favorite was the one with a rocket launcher), dropped the secret car or tank, and ignored the plot, the missions whatsoever. I was after damn havoc and had damn fun. Also, funny thing, but it was GTA Vice City where I discovered the Statistics screen and found my love for raising digits. You know the stuff, the digit goes up – dopamine in your brain says yes. So, now I was invested in turning Tommy into not just a butcher, as he was called by friends of his, but into a straightforward genocidal maniac. Also, I was maniacally obsessed with having longer distances traveled on a motorcycle than on a car. I don’t know what this was about, but apparently, something in my little kid’s brain thought it was important.
Later, when the first half of the city (or the island as we called it since GTA 3) got a bit boring, I started playing missions to get further. And that’s where the well-known RC helicopter mission became a real challenge. I still don’t understand why this mission was so hard for me when I was a kid. Maybe it had something to do with coordination or something. I don’t know. I replayed GTA Vice City four or five years ago, and this mission was a piece of cake even on PS4 (yes, I was this masochistic). Weird stuff. Or maybe it was like Mafia’s race track mission, where in the original game before patches, it was a motherfucking hell on earth, but after patches (which I never saw, by the way), it turned out to be a walk in the park.