GTA London

Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 is an expansion pack for the 1997 Grand Theft Auto. Its full title is Grand Theft Auto Mission Pack #1: London 1969. It swaps the original's American cities for a condensed Central London in the late sixties, with new missions, cars and a British soundtrack. It is not a standalone game in its first release: on PlayStation it needs the original Grand Theft Auto disc, and on PC the original has to be installed.

Two April dates, and a standalone edition in 2000

Rockstar's own game page lists London 1969 for PC and PlayStation with a release date of 6 April 1999 and credits Rockstar North as developer. Wikipedia describes the developer as Rockstar Canada, with Runecraft handling the PlayStation port, and gives 30 April 1999 for both versions, sold on their own and inside Grand Theft Auto: Director's Cut, which bundled the pack with the original game. On that day the company announced that it had shipped the PlayStation version, and described it as the first add-on pack made for the console.

The PC release covered MS-DOS and Windows. In 2000 a standalone Special Edition, playable without the original disc, came out for PlayStation in the United Kingdom. By April 2000, according to Eurogamer, the pack was also on sale in the UK at the budget price of £9.99 from Sold Out Software.

Swinging London squeezed onto one map

The pack takes place in the swinging London of the late sixties. The London packs are the only games in the series set mainly outside the United States, and the map is a heavily condensed Central London divided by the River Thames. It includes Big Ben, the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace.

The player picks one of several London hoodlums and starts out running favours for a small-time gangster, Harold Cartwright, before working up through the city's mobsters, according to IGN. The gangster brothers Archie and Albert Crisp are at war with Cartwright and with Jack Parkinson. The Crisps are based on the Kray twins, and the pack also nods to films such as Get Carter and The Italian Job and has a James Bond-style spy and villain, as the GTA fan wiki lists.

The British setting shows up in small details. Traffic drives on the left, money is in pounds sterling, and Cockney rhyming slang runs through the text: dying brings up "You're Brown Bread!". Getting arrested shows "Nicked" where the original said "Busted".

Rockstar's announcement billed about fifty missions, thirty classic cars and a dozen British villains. IGN's review counted 36 new missions and 30 new vehicles.

A Canadian team and photos of toy cars

Much of the work was done by a Canadian team. In Vice's oral history of the pack, programmer Kevin Hoare switched the driving side to British and rebuilt the traffic logic. Artist Ray Larabie made the cars from photos of British die-cast toy cars bought in Mississauga. The team was told to watch sixties films with car chases, The Italian Job among them. Dan Houser wrote and produced the pack from Rockstar's New York office.

Art critic and novelist John Berger voiced the Crisp brothers without being credited, as Rockstar noted after his death.

Trojan reggae and a BAFTA for sound

Late sixties reggae and ska, largely from the Trojan Records catalogue, share about ten radio stations with Swinging Sixties instrumentals taken from Italian heist film scores. Rockstar's announcement counted fifteen licensed tracks. The audio won the 1999 BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in the Sound category.

Mixed reviews, praised sound, a UK chart topper

Reviews were mixed. GameRankings averaged 75% for the PC version and 69% for the PlayStation version. Critics saw little change from the original beyond the setting, and IGN found the open-ended play much the same as in the first game. The audio drew the praise: IGN called the retro sixties sound the very best attraction of the game.

Sales were good in Britain. According to Wikipedia, London 1969 topped the UK charts in its first two weeks on sale.

London 1961: eight years earlier, free on PC

Take-Two announced a free download for PC owners of London 1969, GTA London 1961, available from 1 July 1999. That was also the day it launched the Grand Theft Auto 2 website. It is shorter than London 1969 and uses the same map and characters, set eight years earlier.

It requires both Grand Theft Auto and London 1969 to be installed. It adds 22 vehicles and a multiplayer map based on Manchester, and it contains the series' first drive-by shooting.

Back in the Classics Collection, and the series goes home

London 1969 was later bundled again in Grand Theft Auto: The Classics Collection, together with Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2. GTA 2 itself came out in October 1999, set in a near-future city, and has no story connection to London. After the London packs, the series stayed in the United States until Grand Theft Auto Online added Cayo Perico in 2020, its first setting outside the country since London.