Open World Driving Games and The Case of The Low Blow

For those who don't know, both the Driver series and Grand Theft Auto are open world driving games. Both started out on the PSX/PC, and eventually graduated to the PS2, where their open world aspects got more fleshed out.

GTA III was the first to test the new waters, and to put it simply, it changed gaming. That's not what we're here to talk about though, so I'll leave it at that. In GTA III, there's a mission where the player is tasked to kill "Two-Face Tanner", an undercover cop.

Tanner is the name of the Driver series's protagonist, and also an undercover cop. Cute little reference? Things get a little bit (hilariously) more hurtful during the mission description.

"Our source in the police has informed us that one of our drivers is a strangely animated undercover cop! He's more or less useless out of his car, so we've tagged it with a tracer. Make him bleed!" - dialogue from GTA III

They are referencing Tanner's almost complete lack of ability to do anything useful outside of his car in Driver 2. They even gave him a female running animation to mock the strange way he moves. Ouch.

Driver didn't get its PS2 installment until well after Rockstar released GTA: Vice City. When Driver 3 (spelled Driv3r officially) finally did get out of the gate, apparently the developers, Reflections Interactive, couldn't let go of a grudge.

This good fellow right here is named Timmy Vermicelli. He may look a little bit like Vice City's protagonist, Tommy Vercetti. A little bit. Reflections Interactive is no more mature than Rockstar, and as you can see, placed water wings on Timmy to mock the fact that Vice City does not allow the player to swim.

Adding even further insult to injury, Tanner is able to swim in Driver 3.

Both games have since branched off into almost entirely distinguishable series, but apparently there was a time when the town just wasn't big enough for the two of them.