How GTA 3 Vice City & San Andreas Made Fun Of The Driver Games

How GTA 3, Vice City & San Andreas Made Fun Of The Driver Games

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At one point in the early 2000s, the Driver and Grand Theft Auto games were active competition – and GTA’s creators decided to poke fun.

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How GTA 3 Vice City & San Andreas Made Fun Of The Driver Games

Although Grand Theft Auto is usually considered an unchallenged juggernaut in 2021, there was a time when the series had rivals. One example is the Driver games, developed by Reflections Interactive (now known as Ubisoft Reflections). In fact, this rivalry manifested itself as repeated jokes in the GTA games, as well as at least one Driver title, in a way that would probably go over the heads of modern gamers.

There have been many Driver games, but the ones relevant here are the first three, which shipped in 1999, 2000, and 2004. Players control an undercover detective named John Tanner who completes missions in real-life cities like Havana, New York, and San Francisco. While there was always an emphasis on an open world, only Driver 2 was the first to let Tanner go on foot at any time, as well as hijack other cars – sounding a lot like Grand Theft Auto, if from the other side of the law.

2001’s Grand Theft Auto 3 features a mission called “Two-Faced Tanner” in which the namesake target is described by one character as a “strangely-animated undercover cop” who is “useless outside of his car.” The parody of Tanner in GTA 3 both looks somewhat like the original and owns a similar vehicle – but has a female character’s animation, a sexist way of driving home (no pun intended) the point that GTA’s creators didn’t think much of Driver 2’s on-foot action. In fact, the latter had weak reviews from some outlets at the time partly for this reason.

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Driver Jokes Continued In GTA For Years

The joke continued in 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with “Dick Tanner,” a European gangster involved in a bank robbery. The character doesn’t survive long – he’s killed by the player’s character, Tommy Vercetti, before the robbery can even take place. Likely in response to this inclusion, Driv3r then featured a character called “Timmy Vermicelli” – a sign that people at Reflections were paying attention.

The rivalry seems to have fizzled out after 2004’s GTA: San Andreas, but not without one last jab from Rockstar. A guard in the mission “Madd Dogg’s Rhymes” can be found playing a video game, and makes a couple of comments – “Tanner, you suck ass!” and “How could Refractions mess up so bad?” That’s probably a reference to Driv3r’s real-world reception – it was one of the worst-reviewed entries in the Driver line.

The games recovered their reputation somewhat with 2011’s Driver: San Francisco, but that was the last major entry, and by then it was no longer thought of as a Grand Theft Auto competitor. The latter series had already become too successful and expensively designed to be touched – GTA 4 cost over $100 million to make, and GTA 5 $265 million, eclipsing budgets of the biggest movies.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/gta-3-vice-city-san-andreas-driver-tanner/

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