The second Grand Theft Auto game is 21 years old, and already back then, Rockstar had some crazy marketing.

Grand Theft Auto 2 came out on October 22, 1999, on PS1 and PC, followed by a SEGA Dreamcast port in May 2000 (July 2000 in Europe), and there was also a Game Boy Color port in the autumn of ’99. The top-down view GTA game had wine, and we had no idea about its existence until now.

Billy Thompson, the co-studio director and design director of the recently purchased Rockstar Dundee (formerly known as Ruffian Games) posted the following on Twitter: „GTA2 turned 21 years old yesterday and I missed its birthday – even though Alisdair Wood pointed it out to me. [I] still got the original PC version in its cellophane and a bizarre bottle of GTA2 branded red wine. I’m sure it will still taste lovely.” He posted the following three images.

VG247 looked into more detail about the red wine, and it turns out that Casara Roveri Cabernet is a fruity wine, with „good ageing potential” of up to 10 years. So it might have aged since worse than expected, and let’s be frank, the same can be said about Grand Theft Auto 2 (because the first 3D game was the third one, and it was the game that catapulted the series into the mainstream).

Since its 1997 start, the Grand Theft Auto series sold over 280 million copies, and the most successful of the crop was Grand Theft Auto V, which launched in 2013 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, followed by a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One port in 2014 and a PC iteration in 2015, respectively. (There’s also a PlayStation 5 port confirmed, and Take-Two, the publisher, would be a fool to skip the Xbox Series.) The game was such a hit that its story never received DLC – instead, all the attention went towards Grand Theft Auto Online.

But seeing how the Assassin’s Creed series got wine in 2018, Grand Theft Auto was yet again a pioneer on this front.

Source: VG247

GTA2 turned 21 years old yesterday and I missed it's birthday – even though @alisdair_wood pointed it out to me. ?

Still got the original PC version in its cellophane and a bizarre bottle of GTA2 branded red wine. I'm sure it will still taste lovely. #GTA2 #feelingold pic.twitter.com/PGcbZI0Rbd

— Billy Thomson (@billythomson75) October 23, 2020

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