Grand Theft Auto GTA

Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, seen from directly above. The first Grand Theft Auto came out of DMA Design in 1997, viewed from overhead, and it already had the shape of everything after it. Three cities, Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, each split into chapters you unlock by scoring enough points doing jobs for whoever is on the payphone. You pick one of eight interchangeable criminals, and the game does not care which. It was built as a racing game called Race'n'Chase, and became something else when the team noticed testers preferred being chased by police to finishing the race.

Sections Cheats

Developer //: DMA Design
Engine //: In-house
Protagonist //: 8 selectable
Released //: October 1997 (MS-DOS and Windows)
Platforms //: MS-DOS · Windows · PlayStation · Game Boy Color

27
Cheats

// 01

Sections

27 entries

#01 27

Cheats

Every code, typed in as your player name on the character select screen.

// 02

What it introduced

4 firsts for the series

01 An open city where the missions are optional and the score is the goal
02 Payphone jobs, which stayed in the series through Vice City
03 A wanted system that escalates from police to roadblocks and spike strips
04 Licensed-sounding radio written for the game, one station per car

// 03

Quick facts

Released: October 1997
Engine: In-house
Director: Mike Dailly
Platforms: 4

// 04

Declassified

It started as a racing game

DMA Design pitched Race'n'Chase, a top-down driving game. A bug made the police cars ram the player instead of pursuing politely, testers liked it more than the racing, and the design turned to follow them.

Codes go in the player name

There is no console. You type the code where the game asks for your name, and it takes effect when the game starts.

Published PC lists do not agree

Several more PC codes circulate, but the sources checked while building this page spell them differently and one of them clearly mistypes a code both agree on elsewhere. Only the codes that matched exactly are listed here.