Original Grand Theft Auto 'almost canned'

@Darnasian What features are you talkin about exactly ? If your talking about the poster and map thing yeah they re in the box as well as a new game manual .. By the way CE comes with 4 discs..

wow interesting read. Love the frnachise. Hope this means that they'll be announcing the next gta soon.

Question: Does the GTA 4 Complete Edition got all the 3 GTA 4 games and all of their features on just one disc? Or there are 2 discs? Or there is just one disc but not with all the features? I mean on console not PC! On ps3 and xbox 360!

I've been palying GTA since the original but really didn't get into until GTA 3. Man GTA 3 Vice City and San Andreas totally blew the doors off gaming for me. They showed me what gaming could really be a whole lot of mindless fun. Unfortunately GTAIV on the other hand wasn't as good as San Andreas. It was very scaled back in comparison to SA I mean the graphics were better and The car physics were top notch but GTAIV lacked alot of the excitement put forth by SA it also was missing alot of content compared to SA like car modding the RPG like elements of the main character and alot of the different vehicles that were in SA like planes. all in all GTAIV was good but nowhere near as good as it's last outing arguably the Best GTA in the series Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

Hard to imagine that this franchise started off with a top down view. This franchise has come a long way.

i was hooked after playing GTA1 demo on PC ill never forget those days, so fun

when GTA 3 came out it made bigger improvments. then vice city put more game play features witch sold more than GTA 1,2 and 3. San Andreas had the biggest gamplay map and much more varity than the other GTAs.

So the world was nearly deprived of one of the greatest franchises of all time? That's disturbing just to think about. San Andreas is my favourite game ever. I can't imagine a world without the game, or any other GTA since 3 for that matter. Well, I can imagine a world without GTA IV....

@DanielL5583, the whole point is that it isn't necessary. It's just escapism. With that said, I didn't really like any of them before IV, but it was more because I didn't think they were all that good.

Got into GTA with part III. Loved Vice City and San Andreas but hated IV. GTA IV was weak. I really really tried to like that game. I made two separate attempts to play through it but quit both times. It just wasn't fun.

I heard that something similar happened to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The publishers wanted to ditch the game until they realized you can reverse your truck through mountains at 5000 miles per hour. When they saw the game's true beauty they knew it would one day become the global smash hit we all know and love.

I genuinely hate the GTA series. I don't mind the fact that they are well acclaimed, but I just don't see any good in fighting as a criminal, potentially killing other innocent bystanders. I don't see the necessity.

17 million copies sold so far, WOW!!! Thats amazing!!!

Can I play Vice City on my 360?

I never really liked the GTA games before IV. I played them but they were always lacking graphically and the car handling was crap and the physics were a joke. Also the police AI was just goofy. IV improved on every aspect of the series and with the DLC content included some of the fun from SA with Gay Tony. I've played and replayed every part of GTA IV several times now and have enjoyed the experience every time. It's definitely on my all time favorites list.

So basically the designers sucked and the engine was incomplete, any game should get "almost" canned for that.

I started with GTA3 and have been hooked ever since. VC and SA were great games and a lot of fun. The sense of humor was what really kept me in the series. GTA4 was alright, it was just too big and detailed to make it fun. Couldn't get around without the GPS. Even with that it was still a great game, although it lost a lot of the sense of humor that I enjoyed in the other three. Still, I hope Rockstar learns for their mistakes of GTAIV and pulls out another win for GTAV.....Also, they need to bring out the PC version at the same time as the console. PC gamers won't mind as much if it gets an AO rating unlike the kiddies who play the consoles. Whats next MAGTA?!!

They seriously need to bring up the shooting and on foot gameplay with GTA 5. At this point it should be on par with other 3rd person shooters for gameplay. It is still a fun game, but it takes a dive when you get out and start trying to get into a gun fight.

The game was good for 10 or 20 minute stints of "ha-ha! look at that! who came up with this stuff?". Then Half-Life came out and GTA was totally forgotten. Until 2001 that is.

I shudder to think of a world without OG Loc.

GTA is a great franchise. And even though I liked GTA 4, I really just want a remake on San Andreas kinda how 4 went back to Liberty City. I mean even that game with updated graphics would be a buy for me. There was so much to that game. Best in the series in IMO

GTA III had A good base but I hated CJ as the main char. so I never finished it . GTA Vice City was great tho and The music alone was awesome.The story line was really good also.

The gaming industry is getting stagnant. I wonder if this column hints at why...

I hated the first GTA. I tried to play it after I played Resident Evil 2 (the best game graphically that I had seen back then) and I couldn't believe they were both on the same console. GTA 3 on the other hand...Damn!!!! That was the best game I had ever seen/ played when it came out. It was you in a living breathing city.

Hah i remember playing the OG GTA laughin my butt off with friends.. Yeah, running from the cops was defiantly the funnest part.. From that GTA to GTA4 my friends and I still play "Who can get the most stars and kill the most cops" while passing the controller on each death.. Good times.

Man whoever thought a glitch could start something so inredibly profitable. Still, I can see how the original was almost canned, it was total crap. The series didn't get good until GTA3, and then the **** hit the fan and life has been awesome ever since.

Can you imagine if it had been ****-canned? R* has reached such a status with it, that they're really living up to their name.

Saved because of a bug... never thought I'd hear that one. :P And it's certainly appalling that one of the best franchises to date was so close to not existing at all.

GTA was one of my favorite games on the original PS. Didn't know that it was available for free, this is great news. They should also release GTA and GTA II on XBLA, PSN and iPad.

I fired this up the other day to show my fiancée as she'd never seen it or played it before and my god, it really is as unplayable and crappy as Gary Penn says. Didn't stop me from loving it as a kid though!

Wow, just imagine where the series would be if the first game had never seen the light of day. We should consider ourselves lucky.

I remember taking a baseball bat to a pedestrian for the first time when I played GTA3. It was a magical moment.

Makes you wonder how many games that were canned by short-sighted suits would have been the start of awesome franchises.

A great franchise that started in a almost canned work.... Great Job Rockstar ^_^

i loved the first GTA and the London version , these were good times

But then I thought "People buy garbage all the time as long as there's enough violence in it" and now you know the rest of the story.

@pokecharm : No it would never have been picked up by somebody else and if it did it probably would have sucked since the IP didn't have value to it. First off because in the 90's games didn't have all the internet hype and if a game got cancelled the only thing coming from other people than the dev's were 'meh'. . This is true also in early 2000. Just look at the X-Com game that got cancelled late 90's, where you had to explore, much like bioshock and a horror-game like dead-space. Instead of that game that looked so promising, another company started production of it and again made X-COM: Enforcer. History is full of all these crap games.

GTA 3 was a revolutionary game, all open world games today are because of this, correction 2bitSmokey EVERYONE loves rockstar :P

I love Rockstar.

truly. cannot. wait. for another one. especially considering the advances brought to the multiplayer table with RdR.

I bought all the original GTA before GTA IV on Steam for 7 bucks. NICE!!

Yeah I remember playing the first GTA, it was awful. Dunno what compelled me to try the third one, didn't even know it was in 3D till I played it, loved it ever since :D

@LordOfShadowXX - I'd like to think if it had gotten canned at this stage, it would have been picked up somehow by another company. Interesting article, nice behind the scenes sort of look :)

We almost missed out on a great game, series and genre. Lucky us.

If this actually got canned then the one of the biggest video game franchises wouldn't exist.