Grand Theft Auto - Vice City

The moment Vice City stops being Grand Theft Auto III with palm trees is when you buy the Malibu Club. Suddenly the map isn't just a set of mission markers; it's a portfolio. Tommy Vercetti takes over an ice cream company, a taxi firm, a print works, a strip club, and each one demands a short run of jobs before it starts paying out a fixed sum you have to walk in and physically collect. It gave the sandbox a reason to keep existing after the story cooled off, and it turned aimless driving into a rent round.

Rockstar North's other big move was letting the protagonist talk. Ray Liotta's Tommy is a bruised, impatient thug who spends the game being condescended to by lawyers, rock managers and Cuban gang leaders, and the writing is sharper for having someone push back. The supporting cast leans hard on 1980s crime-cinema shorthand, and a few of the jokes have curdled badly in twenty years. What holds is the pacing of the escalation: errand boy to landlord to the man in the white suit at the top of the mansion stairs.

Mechanically it is still an early-2000s third-person game with a temperamental camera and combat that leans on a forgiving lock-on. Shootouts are won by strafing and reloading rather than by aiming. What the sequel added instead was verticality and speed — motorcycles, which transform the handling model, and the Maverick, which lets you look down on a city that was clearly designed to be seen from above. The two-island layout is tighter than Liberty City's and easier to hold in your head.

And the radio. Nine stations of licensed music, talk shows and fake commercials, cut so that the DJ patter lands between songs the way real radio does. Vice City's soundtrack is the reason people who last played it in 2002 can still hum the drive to a mission they've forgotten.

It is not the most sophisticated game in the series, and San Andreas would swallow it whole two years later in sheer scale. But few open worlds since have had this much confidence about their own atmosphere, and none have made collecting money from a strip club feel like a career milestone.