- Primary Subject: GTA 2’s experimental design and what Rockstar lost after defining the GTA formula
- Key Idea: Why early GTA experimentation (like GTA 2’s faction systems, weird mechanics, and futuristic setting) represents a creative freedom Rockstar can no longer easily revisit due to the scale and expectations of modern GTA games
- Status: Opinion
- Last Verified: August 2026
- Quick Summary: The piece argues that while modern GTA games are far more polished and successful, Rockstar’s earlier entries (especially GTA 2) had more experimental freedom because the series had not yet been fully defined.
As GTA 6 gets closer, I keep finding myself looking backward at the games Rockstar made before Grand Theft Auto became one of the most rigidly defined blockbuster formulas in gaming.
Not because I think the old games were better (they very obviously were not in plenty of ways), but because there was a period when Rockstar still seemed willing to make a GTA game without knowing exactly what a GTA game was supposed to look like.
GTA 2 is probably the clearest example. Released in 1999, it dropped players into Anywhere City, a vaguely retro-futuristic urban nightmare filled with rival gangs, bizarre technology, homemade radio stations, weaponized cars, and the wonderfully stupid name Claude Speed.
Its faction system meant helping one gang could make another hostile toward you, while different territories had their own identities and even their own radio broadcasts.
Saving your progress involved visiting a church and paying for the privilege (complete with religious jokes at your expense), which is the sort of idea I cannot imagine surviving three meetings at modern Rockstar.
The game itself was hardly some forgotten masterpiece. It could be frustrating, punitive, visually dated even for its time, and its mission design often confused inconvenience with difficulty.
But what sticks with me now is how freely Rockstar experimented before success sanded down the stranger edges.
GTA Became Better Once Rockstar Found Its Formula, But It Also Became Safer
There is a strange contradiction at the center of Grand Theft Auto's history.
Rockstar became a much better developer once it figured out what the series should be, but the clearer that identity became, the less room there was for GTA to be anything else.
You can see plenty of modern Rockstar DNA buried inside GTA 2. Its fictional radio stations were becoming proper pieces of world-building, complete with obnoxious presenters, fake products, and advertisements skewering consumer culture.
Its gangs were more than mission dispensers because your standing with them changed how their neighborhoods treated you.
Even Anywhere City feels like Rockstar fumbling toward one of its greatest strengths - building places that stick with you as much as the characters do. Then GTA 3 happened and the series found the shape that would ultimately conquer the industry.
The leap to 3D was where GTA really found its footing - Rockstar could finally make the city itself as compelling as the havoc you caused inside it.
Vice City gave it personality, San Andreas gave it scale, GTA 4 pushed toward grounded drama, and GTA 5 turned the whole thing into an almost absurdly successful entertainment platform.
I would never pretend that GTA 2's rough experimentation was somehow preferable to that evolution. Yet I do think something was lost once Rockstar discovered exactly what people wanted from the series.
Anywhere City is fascinating precisely because there was no obligation for it to resemble somewhere players already knew. Rockstar could set GTA "slightly into the future," hand you an Electrogun, create competing criminal factions, and build a world influenced as much by dystopian fiction as contemporary America.
The earlier Grand Theft Auto: London expansions were similarly willing to take the basic concept somewhere geographically unexpected. Modern GTA, by comparison, has become inseparable from a very specific version of Americana.
That identity has produced some extraordinary games, but it also means every new entry arrives with a fairly recognizable set of expectations attached to it.
We expect fictional American cities, criminal protagonists, satirical radio, recognizable brands, cinematic missions, escalating police chases, and increasingly obsessive recreations of contemporary life.
Those ingredients work. The problem is that they work so well that Rockstar has almost no incentive to abandon them.
And when a Grand Theft Auto game costs an extraordinary amount to make and attracts scrutiny from practically the entire industry, experimentation becomes harder to justify.
A weird little design choice in 1999 could simply be a weird little design choice. Slip an oddball mechanic into GTA 6 and millions of players will spend years deciding whether Rockstar has just rewritten the series' rulebook.
This is why I do not particularly want Rockstar to remake GTA 2. I certainly do not want limited lives, punishing mission retries, or a save system that demands a chunk of your progress every time you use it.
Some ideas belong in the late '90s and should probably remain there. What I want back is the willingness to make a Grand Theft Auto game that sounds slightly strange when somebody pitches it.
Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij explained in an interview with GamesHub that GTA 2's futuristic setting created problems because the team suddenly had to invent everything from weapons to technology rather than simply working from reality.
I can see why that became a headache - modern America gives Rockstar an almost bottomless supply of material without asking it to invent the world around it. But that inconvenience is also exactly why I find the possibility so appealing.
Imagine a GTA that actually committed to a near-future setting again. Or one that revisited London and had to rethink how weapons, policing, driving, and organized crime function because American rules no longer applied.
Or one that brought back GTA 2's faction concept and allowed relationships with different criminal organizations to meaningfully alter how parts of the map reacted to you. Those ideas might make development harder.
They might also force Rockstar to solve problems it has not already spent two decades solving. That is the part of GTA 2 worth remembering as GTA 6 approaches.
Not because it represents some superior forgotten version of the franchise, but because it comes from a time when Rockstar could still stumble into ideas simply because nobody had established what Grand Theft Auto needed to be.
GTA 6 will almost certainly be a much more impressive game than GTA 2 ever was. That is hardly a contest. But Rockstar’s oddball sequel reminds me that once a formula becomes this valuable, there is considerably less room to muck around with it.
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