Swinging Sixties, Driving on the Left: GTA London 1969

Ask most people to name the games in the Grand Theft Auto series and London 1969 is unlikely to make the list. It is not numbered, it is not a sequel in any conventional sense, and for years it lived in the gap between what counted as a real release and what counted as a curiosity. That makes it exactly the kind of thing a games archive should care about.

Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 came out in April 1999 for PC and PlayStation, published by Rockstar Games. It was developed not by DMA Design in Scotland but by Rockstar Canada, which is itself a small piece of trivia that changes how you read the game. This is the American publisher’s Canadian team making a satirical love letter to Swinging Sixties Britain, which explains a good deal about its tone. It is closer to a broad comic pastiche than a documentary.

The setup is what the title promises. You work your way through a fictionalised London of the late 1960s, taking jobs for local crime syndicates, and the game’s biggest villains are the Crisp twins, Archie and Albert, who are widely understood to be modelled on the real-life Kray twins. The vehicles change to match the setting: Mini-style compacts, double-decker buses, and black Hackney-style cabs replace the American sedans of the original. Traffic runs on the left, which sounds like a trivial detail until you are doing a getaway on instinct and keep swerving into the wrong lane.

The soundtrack is where the game gets the most consistent praise. Rockstar’s in-house composers wrote original music in a spy-film and Sixties-pop style, with track titles that tell you the joke: a “GTA Spy Theme,” a “Queen’s Theme,” an “Austin Allegro Chase.” Contemporary reviews were mixed on almost everything else. Aggregated scores landed in the middling range, with critics noting that mechanically it was very much the first game with new paint, and that the visuals and controls were showing their age even then. The audio was the part almost everyone liked.

The packaging is the real oddity. On PC, London 1969 was an expansion that required the original game to be installed. On PlayStation it could be bought as a standalone product, and a 2000 Special Edition for that platform did not require the original disc at all. In the middle of 1999, Rockstar also released a free, shorter add-on, London 1961, through the GTA2 website, set eight years earlier on the same map. A free download from a publisher in 1999 was unusual enough that it deserves its own footnote.

Why does it matter now? Partly because it shows how flexible the franchise was before it became a single enormous machine. Rockstar was willing to spend a release on a regional joke, a period piece, and a promotional freebie, none of which fit the later template of one giant game every several years. It was also an early proof that the series’ formula could travel: swap the city, swap the era, swap the radio, and the crime-and-chaos loop still works.

I would not tell anyone to skip the mainline games for this one. But if you want to understand the version of Rockstar that was still experimenting, London 1969 is a strange and charming artefact. It is not the best GTA. It might be the most unexpected.