Grand Theft Auto: London 1969

Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 is an expansion pack for the original 1997 Grand Theft Auto, which studio DMA Design set in a fictional version of London at the end of the 1960s. The player still views the city from a bird's-eye perspective from above and carries out jobs for local gangs, but this time amid phone boxes, double-decker buses, and Beatles-era music. Radio stations parody the pop culture of the period, cars drive with the steering wheel on the right, and characters' lines mimic British slang, so the atmosphere feels distinctly different from the American cities of the original game. The streets are also full of typically British black cabs and police cars with bell-ringing lights, which reinforces the period identity more than any other entry in the series.

On PC, London 1969 was released in 1999 as a separately sold expansion that installed on top of an already-owned copy of the original game – it couldn't be run without it. The controls stayed faithful to the original, meaning keyboard and mouse and the same isometric view and engine, so the release brought no graphical or technical novelties. What it offered was purely new content: three interconnected city hubs within London, an updated fleet of period-appropriate cars, and a set of missions continuing the story of London's underworld. Anyone who didn't have the base game installed couldn't play the disc at all. At the same time, it was the last addition to the series before Grand Theft Auto III turned the top-down view into a fully three-dimensional world two years later, making London 1969 the swan song of the original style of play.

Why play it: For fans of the first Grand Theft Auto, this is the cheapest way to extend the fun with an authentic British atmosphere and black humor without having to wait for a full-fledged sequel to the series. Anyone who enjoyed the chaotic shootouts and chases from a bird's-eye view will find the same gameplay here, just in a new, distinctly more European guise, and as a final showcase of the style that made the series famous before its move into 3D.