How Grand Theft Auto got me into tech.

Grand Theft Auto is one of my favorite game franchise of all time, I’ve played every single one from GTA 1 onwards and I’m eagerly awaiting what they come up with in GTA 6. But it’s my favorite game for a strange reason: it got me into tech.

As of writing this post I’m a 31 year old man but lets rewind the clock by about 20 years to when I was 11. At that time my parents bought me a PS2 and they also unwittingly bought me a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. When I first booted the game up and played as CJ I was enthralled and loved every second. My parents however did not look so kindly on a game like this and after watching me kill a few cops, they took the game away and returned it the following day, instead giving me a copy of Midnight Club 3 (which ironically is my 2nd favorite video game of all time).

The Forbidden Fruit

I still remember that moment my parents took the game away 20 years ago and it sparked in me an even greater desire to play GTA. I had recently gotten a computer though this is still years before I would ever write a single line of code or even open up one to see how they worked. But I knew back then that my computer could play GTA, I just needed to find a copy on the internet for free. Free was important back then because I didn’t have a dollar to my name, and would need to ask my parents for permission. Given the earlier snafu, I knew that asking them to buy a copy would be a non-starter.

So I started looking, I learned about the world of torrenting and piracy, I learned about keygen’s and “no-cd cracks”, and I learned that when a torrent is “seeding”, that means it has completed. I must have downloaded 10 different copies of GTA III and even more copies of GTA Vice City and San Andreas, just clicking random things, searching online and praying I could get one of these games to work.

Eventually I got a copy of GTA: Vice City running with a no-cd crack and before long I was playing all the games and modding the crap out of GTA: San Andreas, adding in mods that gave me everything from new cars to a Japanese inspired mountain that you entered off “Pier 69” (ie. the Santa Monica pier).

The Spark that lit the Tech Flame

After that experience in my mid-teens I didn’t stop, eventually starting to mess around with everything from operating systems to virtual machines, messing around with Linux and more. When I was a junior in High School and everyone had to declare a major, I picked Computer Science because I had already been doing everything they taught in my spare time (or so I thought).

Since that time I have stopped pirating games and I now own legit copies of every GTA game. But I just want to say thank you to Rockstar for making such a violent game, and thank you to my parents that took it away from me. It ended up being one of the most formative years of my life and had that not happened I’d probably would have never realized my passion for technology.