Grand Theft Auto Launch Release (France, Germany, Italy)

Grand Theft Auto is the top-down open-world action game that started the series, developed by DMA Design and published by BMG Interactive Entertainment. Players work their way up through the criminal underworld across three cities modelled on real-life locations.

This is the continental European Original release, covering France, Germany and Italy, and it carries the earliest release date we have recorded, 14 December 1997. The game is housed in a Full Jewel PAL case with a Hologram B and contains a single disk. The disk is multilingual, offering English, French, German and Italian text, and the EAN barcode is 0768964280127.

Research notes record that the front of the case carries the words “European Version”, a helpful marker for separating this pressing from its UK counterpart. As an Original BMG Interactive pressing, it sits at the start of the game’s long reprint history, and this makes it the baseline against which later Take 2 Interactive releases are compared.