![]() ![]() ![]() To be told we were at liberty to go nuts in Liberty City was a pivotal moment in the evolution of game design. It wasn't just the freedom of movement, but the sense of place. What GTA did, in its leap to three fully fleshed-out dimensions, was expand the canvas. There had been open-world games before, of course, and Driver had already offered free-roaming car chase thrills only a few years earlier. Given the ubiquity of so many of its ideas, it's easy to forget just what a paradigm shift Rockstar's opus represented. It's a blue-plaque moment as far as technological change is concerned, and even though games like Infinity Blade should have convinced us that these pocket-sized devices can offer more than Snake and Minefield, the arrival of Grand Theft Auto on the iPhone is momentous enough to warrant a contemplative pause. In a moment of cultural symmetry that probably means something or other, "have they pulled it off?" is also the question that greets GTA3 in 2011, as it celebrates its 10th birthday by debuting on mobile platforms that don't even have buttons. "Have they pulled it off?" That was the question spitting incredulously from our lips back in 2001 when Grand Theft Auto made its leap from top-down 2D distraction to fully 3D, open-world game-changer.
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