the background noise

There are those pivotal moments in one's gaming habit that come around every once in a while. Critical junctures or vital forks in the road where things could have been very different had the other choice been taken at the time. Usually you don't see them for what they are in the moment, they are very much things you only recognize retrospectively. Such is the case for the subject of today's post where I am going to ramble on at length on the subject of what might be my favourite game demo of all time. This would be the time-limited taster of everything the original Grand Theft Auto had to offer. Yes the first one that most GTA players at this point probably haven't played, an historical artifact developed by DMA Design out of Dundee and published by BMG Interactive back in 1997.

If any three words could sum up my gaming habits in the late nineties, those three words would probably be ' Command and Conquer ' or even ' Command & Conquer ' if we're going to be pedantic about it. Top down real time strategy games that I was well into back then. The gameplay was solid, the tone (at least in the early games) had the vague feel of the real world about it and most importantly for the subject of today's post, it had a stonking great soundtrack that still holds up all these years later.