Summary
Few video game franchises have been as successful asGrand Theft Auto. From the humble beginnings of the 2DGrand Theft Auto 1has arisen one oftheworld’s highest-selling video game franchises. There are plenty of reasonsGrand Theft Autohas been successful, from epic open-worlds to top-notch gameplay, but one of the things Rockstar has long been known for is its storytelling.
The company has given us some of the most iconic characters in video gaming, but they haven’t all been hits. When we think ofGTAprotagonists, we usually think of the likes of Tommy Vercetti or Trevor Philips, but a fair fewGTAprotagonists have been duds. They don’t jump to mind because they’re just so forgettable. Allow us to jog your memory of these utterly unremarkableGTAprotagonists.
So Claude might seem like an odd pick to start this list with. As the protagonist of one of the most beloved games of all time, Claude is one of gaming’s most famous characters and is instantly recognizable to multiple generations of gamers.Grand Theft Auto 3was one ofthe best open-world PS2 gamesand millions of gamers have spent dozens of hours running around Liberty City as him. Yet we know next to nothing about Claude.
He might be famous, but there’s nothing memorable about him. He has no voice and his character design is about as bland as it gets. His motivation throughoutGTA 3is a simple revenge mission, and he doesn’t interact with any other character in a meaningful way. Rockstar probably intended him to be a way for players to insert themselves into the story, in the same way old FPS protagonists were often voiceless. If Claude had been the protagonist of a lesser game, he’d be nothing more than a footnote in gaming history. Most people who playedGTA 3probably don’t even remember his name.
Grand Theft Auto 4was full of memorable characters. It had one ofRockstar’s longest development timesand the studio clearly spent as much time as possible fleshing out the game’s characters. Niko Belic is one ofGrand Theft Auto’smost memorable protagonists, but unfortunately, the same can’t be said for poor old Johnny Klebitz.While plenty of fans have a soft spot for Johnny, many more have forgotten him completely.
A fair part of that is down to his role as a DLC protagonist. Not everyone who playedGTA 4played its two excellent expansions, while those who did spent considerably less time with Johnny simply because the expansions were shorter than the main game. For aGTAprotagonist, Johnny himself was pretty laid-back and quiet compared to other protagonists. His story was also a fair bit more depressing and subdued too. Looking back, Johnny was actually a great protagonist, but that doesn’t mean people remember him. These days, most who do just remember him getting his skull squished by Trevor inGrand Theft Auto 5.
One of the things that makes mostGrand Theft Autoprotagonists so memorable is how morally reprehensible they are. Half the fun of playing aGTAgame is playing as the villain. But Victor Vance is a good guy. Brother to the treacherous Lance Vance from the originalVice City, Vic is the most noble of allGrand Theft Auto’sprotagonists. He joins the military to help pay Vance’s medical bills and is only thrown out because he’s framed by a corrupt sergeant.
He doesn’t start a life of crime by choice, but so he can provide for his family. Even after becoming a criminal, he’s anti-drug and maintains a strong moral compass. The problem with Vic is that being a goody-goody just makes him a bit bland.As his eventual fate proves, nice guys always finish last, and being a hero ina franchise full of notorious criminalsmakes you forgettable.
When picking a protagonist forLiberty City Stories, Rockstar opted to take a side character fromGTA 3and give him his own game. The problem is that the character wasn’t very interesting to begin with, and Liberty City Stories did very little to flesh him out. He’s a generic Italian-American mobster - born into the Leone crime family and comically loyal to his mother.
That’s about all the characterization Toni gets. A bit like Claude, he’s a stoic psychopath who the player is expected to insert themselves into. He has little agency in the game’s story and other characters call him Fido because he’s obsessed with doing his master’s, Salvatore Leone’s, bidding like a good dog.There’s just nothing particularly memorable, which is a pity because his story had the potential forGodfatherandSoprano’slevel of mob drama.
Considering he’s the protagonist of one ofthe best handheldGrand Theft Autogames, Huang Lee should be more memorable. Unfortunately,Chinatown Warswas good despite, not because of him. Part of the problem is that Huang Lee’s story is a total cliché: he arrives as an immigrant in America determined to track down and kill the man who killed his family. Only to discover the villain was someone close to him all along. Heard that one before?
The other part is the fact thatChinatown Warswas a technically limited handheld game. Lee doesn’t have any voice lines and most of the time we only got to see him from a top-down perspective, neither of which helped his memorability. Most players who do remember him only do so because they found him so unlikable. At the end of the day, there’s just not much to like or remember about Lee.
Grand Theft Auto Advancewas a far cry from other modernGTAreleases and has a lot more in common with the first two games when it comes to both story structure and gameplay. Thanks to hardware limitations, pretty much every aspect of the game was watered down and nowhere was that more apparent than in the game’s story and protagonist. Both of which are barebones. There are lots oficonic Grand Theft Autocharacters. Mike isn’t one of them.
All we know about Mike is that he was once homeless in Liberty City, and he’s intensely loyal to his best friend Vinnie. The game follows Mike’s revenge mission after Vinnie is seemingly killed in a car bombing. Sound familiar?Everything else about Mike is generic.His design in the game’s artwork doesn’t exactly stand out and he receives little characterization outside his loyalty to Vinnie and the occasional sarcastic remark. Combined with the fact thatGrand Theft Auto Advancewas released around the same time asSan Andreas,Mike ends up being one ofGTA’smost forgettable and easily overlooked protagonists.
Grand Theft Auto 2is a weird game, especially the lore surrounding it. The game is supposedly set in a place called “Nowhere City”, but little about the city makes sense. The date is meant to be 1999, but the city itself and many of the weapons players use are futuristic. At the same time, many of the cars are decidedly retro. Even Rockstar doesn’t seem to know what it was aiming for.
The sense of confusion extends to the game’s protagonist, Claude Speed. In the game, he has no personality whatsoever and is a complete blank slate. Most players probably didn’t even realize he had a name. But then Rockstar releasedGTA 2: The Movieto promote the game. This short movie featured live-action Claude completing missions for rival gangs before being assassinated. This version of Claude Speed looks decidedly like Claude fromGTA 3. Are they one and the same? No one knows, not even Rockstar.Some think originally Rockstar planned for them to be the same character back when no one was takingGrand Theft Auto’slore too seriously.OnceGTA 3became a smash hit, they decided to distance the two characters, especially since so few people even remembered Claude’s name from GTA 2. Either way,GTA 2’sClaude has no backstory, no character and we’re never told his motivations. He’s such a forgettable character that even Rockstar can’t decide if he’s canon or not.
Lots ofGTAfans probably think the first entry in the franchise to have multiple protagonists wasGrand Theft Auto 5. They’re wrong.GTA Vmay be one ofthe best GTA games,but the firstGrand Theft Autowas actually the first to do this, way back in 1998.Grand Theft Auto Londonalso had multiple protagonists. Each version of the originalGrand Theft Autobetween the PS1, PC, and Game Boy Advance versions all had slightly different rosters of potential protagonists.
The reason so few people realize this is that these protagonists were little more than named player avatars. Each played the same, none of them had personalities or backstories and the differences between them boiled down to hair color and clothing changes. Considering the fact the player could rename these protagonists, even their names weren’t special. The originalGrand Theft Auto’sprotagonists were characters in the loosest possible meaning of the term. The originalGTAwas all about causing mayhem, the story wasn’t a priority.
