The Getaway’ Could Have Been More Revolutionary Than ‘GTA: Vice City’

​An image from the Getaway games series, via PS4home.com

In the past I’ve lamented the death, or at least the falling out of fashion, of World War II games. Compared to the shooters of today, which bear only the slightest resemblance to the real world, when I play WW2 games, especially the early Medal of Honor titles, I get a real sense that I’m being educated, or that the developers are at least trying to be educational.

Albeit to a lesser extent, I feel the same way about The Getaway, Team Soho’s open-world gangster effort from late 2002. The writing is preposterous rubbish, the kind of Mockney hokum even Guy Ritchie would arraign, and it plays very badly, with enemy cars smashing endlessly into you during the driving sections and sluggish controls turning each shootout into a caracole.

But The Getaway, even if it is in a marginal or tangential sense, has an adherence to real-life that I wish existed in more mainstream video games. The devil’s in the details. The fact that, in The Getaway, I can drive down Barbican tunnel, or walk past a Royal Mail delivery van, or shoot up a warehouse filled with pallets of Foster’s lager, lends even the game’s most ludicrous conceits some gravitas.

I admire the effort, basically. Even 13 years on, when The Getaway‘s digital recreation of W1 London looks more simplistic than ever, I can’t help but be impressed when I round a corner and bump into a location or piece of set dressing that I’m familiar with from reality. Like Medal of Honor‘s historical re-telling, The Getaway‘s very similar backdrop gives a short, sharp connection to the game and its drama that I think is much harder to achieve—and feels inherently strained—when you’re dealing with pure fantasy.

It’s not a complete success. On the contrary, The Getaway was one of the first games, at least that I can recall, to take this kind of wholesale approach to photographic research, and try to render a 3D city as we would already recognize it. Post The Getaway, there was a lot to learn and finesse about this process—rather than a comprehensive report, this game might have been the start of something, a new discipline in regards to open-world design. So what happened?

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is what happened. Where The Getaway tried to take contemporary crime games, and by extension mainstream video gaming, into a real-world aesthetic, Vice City plundered for inspiration TV shows and movies. Miami Vice, Scarface, and the music videos of Steve Barron were visual springboards for Vice City, and it formed a bricolage of other people’s fantasies, a hyper unreality where you recognized everything not from real-life, but from media and entertainment.

S​​tep outside of Tony Montana’s mansion in Vice City—wearing if you like the bank heist outfit from Heat, or the cop uniform from Cop Land—and you can drive the Ferrari that belonged to Crockett and Tubbs, or a taxi with “Kaufman” written on the side. Your friends are played by Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper, Lee Majors—you are voiced by Ray Liotta. Vice City is an obliteration room of cultural references, a tribute to mass-market dreams from the past and present.

And it’s wacky. You can run over pedestrians in a golf cart, or don a hockey mask and go tearing around with a chainsaw. You can buzz around Vice City in a helicopter. You can shoot up a shopping mall. You can use a spotlight to project a giant pair of breasts against the side of a building. In the narrow, depressing, video game sense of the word, Vice City is fun. It’s the progenitor for what we now understand as open-world games.

And it absolutely destroyed The Getaway. Despite launching late in October 2002, by NPD estimates Vice City became the best-selling game that year. It remained in the chart throughout 2003, outshining The Getaway even as it launched in two more territories, Japan and North America.

A trailer for American release of ‘The Getaway’

Whatever The Getaway was trying to evince in regards to world design got lost amidst GTA’s monumental success. In the short term, Vice City was the “better” game, bigger, cooler, and more competently made, but nowadays it’s The Getaway that feels like the real revolutionary. It took an approach to design that, to this day, belies what I’d expect from open-world games.

The central promise of video games is that they allow you to experience things you can’t do in real-life, at least not from your armchair. And it seems that, in the echo of Grand Theft Auto’s success, open-world designers have conflated that promise with exploration and fantasy—the more a sandbox game lets you do, and the less it ties you to the rules of the real-world, the closer, ostensibly, it adheres to principal gaming ideology.

But that idea is bunkum, because although I am unable to do the things I do in GTA, or Assassin’s Creed, or Saints Row in real-life, I’m also unable to jump in a car and simply cruise around London. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time. There are dozens of places—real places—that I wish I could visit and just see, but the myriad pressures of adult life prohibit expensive travel.​​

And so, after repeatedly playing through the same sandbox paradigm—wackiness, “content,” a location that’s either entirely made up or merely based on reality—the idea of walking around, say, a comprehensively recreated Los Angeles sounds to me like a very special and vivid experience, something which I can’t readily do in real-life and that only video games can provide. I’m sure there are simulators for this kind of thing, dry technology showcases for virtual reality or haptic feedback, but those don’t fulfill the other half of this wish: for games, specifically games, to aspire towards education, for them to teach me the physical and social geography not of a close approximation of a city, but a city itself.

The Getaway, quite often a bad game, and itself sadly bound to the idea that open worlds should be playgrounds for driving and shooting, is not a wholesale rebuttal to the kinds of sandbox games that exist today, but it could have been—should have been—the nexus point for a different strain of open-world design. Its defeat to Grand Theft Auto highlights how narrow the idea of a special experience is in video games, how made-up worlds are considered more vibrant than real ones, how fiction is considered more interesting than fact, how fantasy—childishly, tragically—is preferred to reality.

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