Getting my hands on a PS2 copy of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories was harder than I thought it would be. The lengthy wait was worth it, though, and as I gently pulled the box out of its plastic shipping wrap, I could pretend for a moment that it was 2006 again.
I last played Liberty City Stories on my brother's PSP some baffling 19 years ago, the bite-size prequel to GTA 3 that returns players to the mean, mafia-run streets of Liberty City, this time as low-level Leone family devotee Toni Cipriani. Zipping down the streets past smooth textured, angular apartment blocks might not be the most high fidelity adventure the Rockstar series has to offer, but it's a glimpse back to a sillier time when these games benefited from a much lighter touch in general. I don't expect GTA 6 to have this level of immaturity, but maybe there's something to be said about how GTA has always done a brilliant job of making mundane things outrageous – and the other way round.
Average Joe
It's a tight experience, easily playable within five hours, and Liberty City Stories feels that much more compulsive for it. Side missions are largely games of fetch, street racing, or timed trials, leaving little room to flesh out the colorful NPCs in favor of exploring Liberty City as a setting.
That said, in classic Rockstar style, there are a great many colorful NPCs out there. From adult babies to an annoying quasi-boss who calls himself "Daddy Vincenzo," Liberty City Stories takes less than an hour to show me its weird stripes proudly. It's a quintessential early GTA experience: you're a nobody who wants to be a somebody, and you have to jump through all manner of baffling hoops to achieve that dream. But while the life of an everyday gangster might not be too relatable to the average person, something about Toni's remarkably unremarkable personal life makes it even funnier.
There's something so simple about that premise that I can't help but love it.
In my mind, that's what makes Liberty City Stories so entertaining. I can't say I've stalked my mother's boyfriend through a park, camera in hand and hellbent on retrieving photographic evidence of his shady diaper-clad rendezvous with three prostitutes, but I get the family drama. The trope of a disappointed parent is a well worn thing that could err on the side of depressing, but Toni's strained relationship with Mrs Cipriani given a splash of daft humor to make it more farcical than emotional.
She absolutely refuses to see her cheating boyfriend as a bigger let down than her wannabe gangster son, and the fact that you never see the woman herself, only hearing her shrill voice hurling New Jersey-affected insults down from her apartment block, makes it even funnier to witness. She's not angry that Toni wants to be a mobster. No, she just hates that he's so far down in the mafia food chain that he has become an embarrassment. So begins Toni's set of Liberty City stories, each paving the way to what he hopes to be a bright future with the Leone family. Essentially, it's all to make his mama proud. There's something so simple and universal about that premise that I can't help but love it, even if he does murder the aforementioned adult baby boyfriend in the very next mission.
I'm still early in my Liberty City Stories journey, and truth be told, I'd very nearly forgotten it entirely. It's far from the best PSP game ever, and certainly doesn't beat Vice City Stories or Chinatown Wars in when you line up all three GTA games made for the Sony handheld, but the roots of GTA are all here. You're a down-on-your-luck antihero, living in a lawless city that refuses to stay at your feet, and there's something warm and fuzzy about how GTA 6 is likely set to give us exactly that someday soon – low poly buildings aside, most likely.
Check out our GTA 6 wishlist of everything we hope to see in the series' long-awaited next chapter
