For the vast majority of the time of its running minutes, Bullitt is pretty boring. They dont tell you, but the classic movie was shot during the rise of the new Hollywood; conventional notions of story payoff and pacing were going out of fashion and followed the story of Steve McQueen as he fiddled in an empty hospital looking for a sandwich.
But for the blistering 10 minutes in the middle of the movie, the car tires barely touch the ground. Maybe it was due to the stimulatory expropriation of the scenes on either side. When Steve McQueen started chasing two killers in the pursuit, driving their cars all the way out of San Francisco, my hands were flying up in the air like I was on a rollercoaster of a ride.
The muscle cars, the chalkboard tire screech, the free-rolling hubcaps, and of course McQueen’s savage tire twisting as he weaved through the traffic, all of it paved the way for the open-world games three decades later. The chasing scene doubled as the design document for the Driver, and Rockstar followed the trend close behind: just as McQueen filled the rearview mirror of the hitmen,s dodge charger with the dust from his mustang.
Bullitt established the city of San Francisco as the international city of car chases with its extreme verticality, dense junctions, and tram tracks. It’s a distinction that Ubisoft made three open-world games in just half a decade. The Crew, Watch Dogs 2, and Driver: San Francisco, bonus points if you named them all.
Today, though, the ground of the car chasing games is very thin. The Driver is going on the ice, the Crew got distracted by a passing plane from its side, and GTA releases are now so far apart they are recorded in eons, not years. Watch Dogs is committed to capturing London’s street plan, a city so egregiously bad for drivers that its locals were driven underground. Please dont fact check it with historians.
The out-turn of all the genre stagnation and inactivity is that the classics in the talking haven’t been bettered. Gamers returning to the Definitive Edition of the GTA three will find that the driving in the game still stands up even though the storytelling and shooting are pretty unrefined. Catalogs of flatbeds, sedans, and ambulances of Liberty City remain twitchy and carefree in a way that they make you fight with them to control, making the basic A to B missions of the game captivating.
In a city that has not been designed for chaos, running through it with high speed is pretty perversely exciting. The street furniture and the poor AI civilians waiting to tremble under the tires of your speed-gushing car are just overwhelming. The Liberty City is made to look beautiful and full of different details when traveled on foot, but who does that? Am I right?
When you are playing a game like Forza Horizon 5, an arcade motorsport game, the experience is very different. Even though the side rails crumble by the hits, the barrier bounces you nack on the track and make you focus more on the road, just like training bumpers in ten-pin bowling. Everything on the screen you see in the game is made to keep you on track and keep your momentum high to win the race. On the other hand, GTA 3 feels like everything in the game is working against you, and just as you take the next turn, two men will be walking out holding a sheet of glass between them to make your day into a nightmare.
GTA III’s best mission isn’t scripted to make you go in a certain direction, Vigilante challenge can be accessed by using any police car you can find in the city, and the endless Bullitt-style car chases take place because you have to chase a target and ram him off the road, preferably knocking them upside down to trigger one of the best mechanical quirks of the game, the roof-down-explosion.
Enough attempts, and you ultimately start to learn about the three islands in Liberty City just like a Taxi driver would. You know to sniff through the back routes and even the grass verges to avoid the unconventional traffic that always makes you scratch your mind. You will focus on mentally remembering all the locations of the police bribe icons on the map by just glancing at the map for a second if the citizen’s arrest escalates. In fact, rerouting is an important part of the game, as you have to learn the different routes you can take to avoid anything chasing you through the streets, whether it’s the police or not.
I sometimes think if the developers of the new urban open-world games consider themselves a relic of their past, a stepping stone in the journey that took them to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Horizon Zero Dawn, or they would rather consider themselves a subgenre to iterate and improve on their own right. The city car chase is a relevant part of the pop culture that got big with Bullitt back in the ’60s and getting pushed on to another level by the movies like Fast & Furious series.
Hope lies with the next eon of the GTA and the trailer we got of the Saints Row Reboot, which will be coming in 2022. They put handbrake turns and muscle cars front-and-center in its announcement. For now, you can find me wandering around the car parking of the Portland island police station, getting ready to deliver some justice on the roads of Liberty City.
Source: GTA 3 Definitive Edition Reminds Us, Great Racing Games Are Not About The Race, Its About The Chase
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