Society is in rapid decay. With the crime rate soaring and biochemical dependency in healthy proliferation, you are about to have the time of your life. The city is on the edge of collapse, with law and order beginning to break down completely. People are running wild, half-addled on food additives and semi-legal pharmaceutical pills. A giant corporation controls every aspect of society, from entertainment to organ transplants. Everything is polluted, dirty, unpleasant. Life has never been cheaper. It’s a premise that belongs in a sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020. Instead, improbably, it’s the way Rockstar chose to introduce GTA 2. Just two years before the series unfolded in three dimensions, expanding its audience in kind, the mainline Grand Theft Auto was a rock ‘n’ roll sci-fi dystopia. GTA 2 belongs to an experimental period in the late ’90s, when Rockstar believed the series could be basically anything. Earlier the same year, the publisher had released GTA: London 1969, a reggae-soundtracked tribute to The Italian Job. Rather than a recognisably real American city like LA or New York, GTA 2’s backdrop is ‘Anywhere, USA’—a post-industrial deathtrap where corps sells their drugs with slick ads on the radio, while openly engaging in…