EDGE Magazine: GTA III Among The Top In 2000-09

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EDGE Magazine has had a running feature where they discuss the best games from the year 2000 to 2009. Today's edition of the feature talks about Grand Theft Auto III and how it changed gaming into what we know and love today. Check out some excerpts below.

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"While the success of a mere videogame can be counted in dollars and cents, the importance of Grand Theft Auto III can only be measured in panic. Like the horror comics of the ’50s, the ‘video nasties’ of the ’80s and ‘parental advisory’ CDs of the ’90s, the hysteria surrounding Rockstar’s game speaks not to any purported links to crime and depravity, but to its power to set agendas, fire the imagination and shape the minds of its audience. Whenever those prerogatives of the press and politicians become threatened, as they have by works from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to The Wild One, the creation of a ‘folk devil’ is all but assured."

"“GTA’s provided a wealth of precedents which add some certainty to future legal decision-making,” says Chris Bennett, a partner in videogame law specialist Davis LLP, and author of its popular Video Game Law Blog. “Some would argue that Rockstar’s the perpetrator in this because it initially claimed that Hot Coffee [the mod that exposed sexual content left in the code of San Andreas] was the work of hackers – which was, in a sense, correct. It’s added sex to a mix previously concerned with violence.” The bottom line in every such furore since time immemorial: “The games aren’t intended for kids, though, and shouldn’t be an issue if parents pay attention.”"

"Furthermore: “Anyone passing through Times Square is distinctly aware of the moments when inert, dark buildings give way to the iconography of attached electric and printed billboards. In GTA the buildings have the same equivalence, the same level of presence, as billboards, screens and adverts. Steel, information, glass and lights become a continuous rendered soup, an intoxicating surface experience that imagineers, advertisers and architects could only previously imagine. This seamlessness of experience is beginning to infiltrate buildings, in part as a result of the digital means of production but more significantly as user expectations evolve. The game has offered a challenge to the designers of our future cities to accommodate, rather than dictate, individuals’ needs and desires.”"

Read the full article here and be sure to join us at the Grand Theft Auto 5 forums!