GTA3-style design - How did it evolve?

I don't recall Quarantine being released in the US for the Playstation.

I bought and attempted to play through Body Harvest three or four years ago, and even back then it was slow-paced and boring as hell. I lost all interest after beating the first boss and haven't bothered to pick it up since.

Also, this is going off an ancient memory of a game that I only played once for about three-four hours, but wasn't the NES version of Dick Tracy somewhat of a precursor to the 2D GTA games? I remember that you would drive around a huge city in your police car chasing criminals as the police station called in your missions through the car radio. Additionally, I think you could get out of the car to explore the city and enter warehouses where you would shoot and capture criminals in sidescrolling segments. Anyone else play that one?

Oh yeah, good call on NES Dick Tracy. You could exit your car and walk around in that game. I was trying to think of NES games but all I could think of was Mad Max which doesn't quite fit.

How about Motor City Patrol for the NES? You can't get out of the car, but you drive around the city (as a cop) trying to catch the robbers. The game isn't all that great though....

Would you consider Midwinter an early sandbox game?

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

Postal? Maybe. I don't remember the first Postal that well. I don't recall vehicle usage anyway.

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I'm pretty sure Postal had sandbox elements to it. On top of that, you ran around the city killing innocent civilians, much like everyone's favorite GTA pastime. I've heard the idea for the original GTA partially came from Postal, though that could be wrong.

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Originally Posted by g0zen

Would you consider Midwinter an early sandbox game?

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I do consider the Midwinter series sandbox games but I decided they were too strategy-like for the topic. I can see them being included, though. They were 3d and had various vehicles.

That NES Dick Tracy game was the shit when it first came out - I was disappointed that the Genesis game wasn't basically a copy of it just with better graphics since I loved it so much but felt the concept should've been done on stronger hardware.

Great concept for a thread. I was quite oblivious to most of the games you mentioned before Quarantine.