This appears to have been view from within the game’s Scotland-based development studio, too. Reappraising vintage creative works according to present-day values is a voguish enterprise, but this is a legitimate question for a suite of games well-known for their vigorous send-ups of American society, soon to be resuscitated into a landscape still cratered and smouldering from the Trump presidency’s cultural barrage. Now, with the announcement of so-called remasters of the three formative 3D games in the series – 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III, 2002’s Vice City and 2004’s San Andreas, set respectively in modified versions of New York, Miami and Los Angeles – another dimension has been added to the would-be critic’s already impossible mission: how to consider each game’s much-vaunted satire from a contemporary perspective. Grand Theft Auto III Photograph: Rockstar The idea of a full and rounded appraisal of games these enormous and multifaceted is not only laughable, but frankly exhausting. Take your pick: architectural or topographical? Sociological or literary? Cinematic or satirical? Do you evaluate the handling of the cars, or the music played by the game’s various radio stations? The quality of the light in a digital sunrise, or the strength of the jokes in Ricky Gervais’ virtual stand-up sets? Each approach presents a different vista, a new text, an alternate proposition. These are simplified and flattened recreations of human cities, of course, but each is sufficiently complex to invite a range of critical lenses. Still, this has never stopped critics from attempting to review the Grand Theft Auto video games holistically, despite the fact each one contains similar multitudes to the American metropolises from which they borrow their settings. To review a shimmering city, across all its multitudinous material and social vectors – its traffic systems and sewerage networks, its job prospects and police attitudes, its air pollution and book clubs, its art galleries and vermin infestations – is obviously preposterous. The magazine responded in a blogpost titled The Paris Review reviews Paris (the verdict? “ It’s pretty good!”), but the absurdity of the premise was acknowledged in the brisk, tongue-in-cheek appraisal. I n 2013, then-poet, now Booker prize finalist Patricia Lockwood tweeted at the Paris Review: “So is Paris any good or not” The tweet, which went viral, was funny on a number of levels, but particularly its suggestion that anyone might venture to assess the qualities of an entire city.
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