The first Rockstar game that really grabbed me was GTA IV, and its successive expansions. It was unlike anything else I had ever played, and established Rockstar in my mind as the premiere developer of narrative-driven games.
Sure, I had played and enjoyed their earlier output. Yes, even their early top-down GTA games. And Bully. And Table Tennis.
But GTA IV kicked it all to a new level.
A sprawling, realistically-rendered city with a level of physics detail never-before-seen. A huge cast of well-acted and well-written characters. And a properly-structured narrative with real character arcs, containing a solid blend of human themes, action movie nonsense, and the overt satire Rockstar is most famous for.
It also had a weird multiplayer mode.
In that mode, you could run around as your own avatar across the game world with a handful of other players, then dive into more standard game modes like Deathmatch and vehicle races.
The single player campaign and its two expansions presented an epic trilogy of movie-style narratives at a budget and execution level unlike anything else in…
