// PC GAMER — GAMING
GTA: London 1961 is full of cockney innuendo and harder than a bobby’s helmet
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
In the wake of GTA 6, series veterans will wax nostalgically about the era of Rockstar expansion packs. No sooner had you finished The Lost and Damned, they'll tell their nurse in between spoonfuls of prunes, The Ballad of Gay Tony landed on your hard drive. There was none of this 'waiting a decade for a new GTA' nonsense.
Fewer will remember the first age of Grand Theft Auto, when even the expansion packs had expansion packs. Really—GTA birthed GTA: London, which in turn begat GTA: London 1961. The latter was released for free online in the summer of 1999, where only a subset of disc-spinning PC gamers were ever likely to find it. Which might have been for the best. Because GTA: London 1961 is perhaps the most punishing visit to the British capital ever conceived. Even including 28 Days Later, and the press reception of Meghan and Harry.
The original Grand Theft Auto already demanded a lot from its players—splicing a nascent open world structure with the limited lives and scorechasing of the arcades. To pass a given level, you'd need to complete several back-to-back chains of missions, thereby building a sufficient multiplier to reach the target score. Getting busted would halve your multiplier instantly. And since cops only needed to bump into you to effect an arrest, like a ghost in Pac-Man, you could easily wind up back at square one, with a dwindling pool of missions to pick from.
GTA: London 1961 is perhaps the most punishing visit to the British capital ever conceived.
To this brutal ruleset, the designers of GTA: London 1961 decided to add mission timers tighter than Adam West's batsuit. How does 20 seconds from East Bermondsey to West Southwark strike you? Or 30 from Westminster Palace to the City of London, where the bankers work? Even in GTA's shrunken top-down metropolis, it's an extraordinary ask—only possible if you pick precisely the right route, floor it, and somehow avoid any serious collisions along the way. "You got to be a little faster," explains your cock-er-ney paymaster, helpfully. "Or Harold'll have your guts for gardening with!"
And should you fail, even once? Those same gangsters will throw you out on your arse, ending the mission with no way of recovery. "This ain't some leisurely afternoon stroll with a stunning bird! This is major international crime, and time and crime waits for Norman, as Harold once said! You blew it, you nob!"
I can't help but wonder how Harold can afford to be so picky with his drivers. If he's got Charlie Croker on the other end of the blower, why is he talking to me in the first place? Good riddance.
Except, without the largesse of old Harold, making money in London is no walk in the park. It might be a drive through Hyde Park, knocking down pedestrians in precise combos to try and max out your score the hard way. Or a slow, repetitive shift at the docks, feeding endless stolen cars to the crane in exchange for £100 notes. I scuppered my chances there by rolling an enormous red bus halfway into the Thames, blocking the crane and making future deliveries impossible.