Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

As we inch closer to the 10-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III this Saturday, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about the era of gaming that it ushered in, and how it changed the way developers look at games. But aside from standardizing open worlds and giving us and a decade of morally ambiguous gaming, GTA as a series has told a lot of fascinating stories. And a big reason those stories were so fascinating was their cast of larger-than-life scumbags, psychos and sociopaths, most of which were not only memorable, but surprisingly complicated underneath their cartoonish exteriors.

With that in mind, we roped together a few of our editors and wouldn’t let them leave until they’d told us, in their own words, which ones were their favorites...

Okay... put those last-gen Ladies of the Evening out of your mind, because the consummate professionals of Grand Theft Auto IV are here to strut the concrete catwalk. That’s right, the Hookers of GTA IV have arrived, and despite only coming in white and skinny, or fat and black, they’re positively overflowing with next-gen gutter-glam.

Ever since the advent of Grand Theft Auto III, the GTA series has practically been defined by the iconic art that's accompanied every release. It's adorned every cover and loading screen in the series so far, and when it changes - as it did to reflect the more realistic tone of Grand Theft Auto IV - people take notice. Distinct and memorable, it's added to the series' hip edge and made its characters into fearsome symbols of fearsome badassery, giving them a larger-than-life quality that jumbles of in-game polygons just can't pull off.

We know that all you GTA heads are neck-deep in the beautifully rendered corpses of mid-level irritating crime-boss douchebags, but let’s take a moment and consider our roots. Liberty wasn’t always this chock-full of cell phone blabbing pedestrians, road raging grandma SUV pilots, and rights-violating officers of the law. In a simpler time, there was only one camera view looking down on all the chaos and the citizens were jaggy

It wasn’t easy compiling this list. There are just so many tiny brilliant things lurking the various cities of Grand Theft Auto - everything from tombstones that glow at night to a ‘Locals Only’ shop to Valentino Rossi’s MotoGP bike to the actual meaning of ‘burger shot’ to ridiculous posters for the Wizard of Ass - and there’s no telling which you might have seen, and which you may remain blissfully

Grand Theft Auto IV nearly upon us, and the only group anticipating the release of GTA IV more than gamers are lazy-ass journalists readying their speculative segments and editorials. Crouched at the April 29th starting line and foaming at the bit for that coveted variable to throw in place of their tired "Grand Theft Auto inspires X to Y" headlines.  

Crime doesn’t pay. But virtual crime? That does pay. And by the bucket-load. Even by the time the series reached Florida, it was breaking records in a major way, with Vice City becoming the fastest-selling PS2 title ever - until San Andreas beat it. And that’s despite four million Americans pre-ordering Vice City, and a million more buying it upon its release (here in the UK, the Miami Vice-vibed title shifted over a quarter of

Heroes, cities and decades change, but in the world of Grand Theft Auto, the hard-working hooker will forever remain. No matter what the year or console, we can always count on her to patrol our virtual streets and stir up our real world controversy. Isn't it time, then, that this beloved gaming icon received the spotlight she deserves? And more importantly, isn't it fun to laugh at really cruddy last-gen graphics? We think so.