I skipped a post last week because I was just too busy to sit down and write something. Well no more of that, I promise! Between packing stuff and getting ready to move I've found the time to return to some old favorites of mine from a company that is quite well known, Rockstar Games.
The three games I'll be talking about in this post are all venerable classics in their own right, all released within a year of each other. They are: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), The Warriors (2005) and Bully (2006). Though each game was made by separate studios working under the Rockstar banner I show how they all share a common DNA.
Rockstar are best known for taking the Grand Theft Auto series, a relatively obscure top-down 2D game, and turning it into a genre-defining powerhouse that rocketed the company to global stardom. In 2001 DMA Design, later rebranded Rockstar North, shifted the perspective to 3D, set the game in a city based on several real-world locales and used in-game cinematics to tell a mobster tale cribbed from all the best mobster movies.
The result was a game that dropped you into a giant city and let you run rampant to your hearts content. In the following years Rockstar would continue to scoop up talented developers and rebrand them as members of their own corporate family, releasing one hit game after another.
By 2004 the Edinburgh, Scotland-based team at Rockstar North were releasing their crowning achievement up to that point: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the third 3D GTA game following Vice City. San Andreas did everything bigger and better than before. Now featuring multiple cities based on real world locales, more vehicles and even more mayhem the game's story took the player through a dizzying ride of inner-city gang-banging, street racing, casino-robbing and top-secret military break-ins.
By this point it was becoming clear that what made GTA special was not simply the level of freedom afforded the player but the attention to all the little details that made up the world of the game. This was series that had a particular style to it and a group of people devoted to adhering to that sense of style at all costs. This sense of style was even more apparent in Rockstar's next game, 2005's The Warriors.
The Warriors is the video game version of the classic 1979 film of the same name. It's about a street gang from Coney Island, called The Warriors, who are framed for assassinating the person who tried to unite all of New York's gangs. The movie is about their desperate struggle to survive the night after this accusation, braving all of New York's baddest boppers and make it back to their home turf in Coney Island.
The video game version follows that same story but begins several months in advance. You get to play through flashback levels that show how The Warriors got started and how the key members joined. The game itself is a 3D brawler, or beat-em-up, where you control various Warriors at various points during the story. The story itself is broken down into 20+ missions, or chapters, and completing them along with bonus objectives unlocks new characters and game modes, in particular a multiplayer Rumble Mode where you can square off against your buddies.
The Warriors is a wonderful game because it is pure to its genre and very well-executed. It isn't open world like GTA but it's individual levels are often very large and that Rockstar-style attention to detail is here in full force. The game takes place in the same setting as the movie: Late '70s New York. Gangs roam the streets, trash and bums line the alleys and normal people can't walk far without getting mugged, usually by the player.
The setting in the game is just evocative as it is on the big screen, complete with the rumble of elevated trains, graffiti on the walls and tenement housing projects silhouetted against a sky that is perpetually just at dusk. Not even San Andreas quite captured such an accurate feel for time and place as The Warriors did, and San Andreas was really trying.
The Warriors builds the story and mythology of the world up and then unleashes the whole thing on you at the end in the form of an interactive version of the movie. The last chapters of the game are literally the movie, beat for beat, except this time it's you who's trying to make it back to Coney not just Cleon and the gang.
So San Andreas features melee combat it's not really a brawler, like The Warriors, it's more of a driving game than anything else. And The Warriors, while having pretty big levels, is no open worlder. However the thing that makes you realize both games are made by the same company is that insane level of detail to their respective settings that each game features.
But what if there was an open world brawler that featured the best of both games? Turns out there is and it came out in 2006. Rockstar's Vancouver studio, now merged with Rockstar Toronto, made Bully, an open world school yard brawler with a soundtrack that captures that sense of nostalgic yearning we all feel from time to time.
Bully was the story of 15 year old Jimmy Hopkins, a troubled boy dumped by his mom at Bullworth Academy, a private school set in the fictional town of Bullworth. Bullworth and it's surrounding environs are loosely based around Connecticut, it seems, and the story takes place in 1995. Bully was about bullying, or rather it was about Jimmy Hopkins beating up bullies and gaining the favor of Bullworth Academy's various factions: The Nerds, The Jocks, The Preps and The Greasers.
Bully doesn't start out open world. At the beginning much of the game is locked off until you complete enough story missions. By Act IV however you have the whole town opened up for you and you can bike and skateboard your way around town or to the carnival or your paper route between classes. You know, if you feel like.
Bully is what happens when you take an unwieldy superstructure like San Andreas and apply the tight focus of The Warriors on top of it. It's a brawler through and through like The Warriors, but everything else about it is very GTA. For instance, the game features multiple modes of transportation. Jimmy isn't old enough to drive but he eventually gains access to bicycles, a skateboard, a go-kart and even a moped. If you want to get around town quickly on your skateboard you can grab onto the bumper of a passing car and ride it like Marty McFly in Back To The Future.
Between beating up bullies Jimmy can work odd jobs to make spare cash and use that cash to purchase new outfits for himself from various stores. If you go to Jimmy's classes and complete the tasks there you open various new abilities and items for him. In this way the game features a level of customization on par with San Andreas'.
And while Bully is violent like The Warriors and San Andreas it's a more innocent kind of violence, if that makes sense. No one actually dies from getting beaten and there's no blood in the game. There are no guns either but you can still shoot people with a slingshot and a potato gun.
So Bully has an open world structure but the game itself is a tightly focused, story-centric beat-em-up like The Warriors. And all throughout the game features that same loving attention to detail as the rest of Rockstar's oeuvre. Bully takes place in 1995 but the game doesn't go out of its way to make this clear to you. In fact, it almost exists in a weird timeless era until you go online and look up the fact that it's set in the middle '90s. Then it becomes clear why the only computer you encounter in the game is a desktop in The Nerds' basement hideout underneath the comic shop in downtown Bullworth.
San Andreas is the pinnacle of open world excess and The Warriors is a love letter to a cult classic. Bully feels like a strange middle ground between the two. It's excessive to a degree but still restrained. The game and it's story feel like a love letter to John Hughes teen movies that were never written. Yet it also feels like a last hurrah for an era of childhood innocence that was over with all too quickly once computers and the internet proliferated throughout society and changed the ways we interacted with each other.
Throughout all three games there is a distinct feel, something that's hard for me to pin down, that is exemplified in their settings. They celebrate time and place in ways that other games don't even attempt and that's just part of Rockstar's magic.
San Andreas isn't just a game set in southern California, it's set in southern California in the early '90s. The Warriors isn't just set in New York, it's set in New York of the late '70s. It's the same with Bully though it's a bit more muddled and less apparent. It isn't just set in New England, it's set in New England in the final years of the 20th century at childhood's end.
When I play these game it isn't just to drive around a city or beat up a bunch of goons. It's also to visit a time and a place, some I have actual memories of and other others I could only glean from popular media. With games like San Andreas, The Warriors and Bully I feel as though I am able to go home again, if however briefly or fleetingly. And it's a feeling I can return to again and again, as much as I wish, and I thank Rockstar for giving me that.
Thanks for reading.
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