Grand Theft Auto 2
The Zaibatsu Always Wins: Notes on Grand Theft Auto 2
There is a particular kind of cultural object that becomes more interesting the more it is forgotten. Grand Theft Auto 2, released by DMA Design in 1999 on the exact cusp of everything that was about to happen, is one of these. Wedged between its scruffy 2D predecessor and the civilization-shifting 3D of GTA III, it now lingers as a kind of embarrassed middle child in a franchise that has become a culture industry unto itself. Almost nobody plays it anymore. Almost nobody needs to. And yet returning to it today, you find something stranger and more revealing than the mature Rockstar product machine seems capable of producing — a game that was, almost by accident, diagnosing the present we eventually got.
The setting is "Anywhere City" — a name so flat and functional it might have been generated by a Mark Fisher concordance. It is a late-90s vision of a near-future that the late 90s assumed would arrive: neon, corporate compounds, gang territories, grainy cyberpunk gestures filtered through the budget of a top-down engine. Promotional materials positioned it as taking place "three weeks into the future," which, like most sincere predictions from that moment, now reads as accidentally profound. Because the future GTA 2 gestured toward — gleefully lawless, policed by private corporations, colonized by esoteric gangs — didn't arrive, at least not in the form the game imagined. What arrived instead was flatter, slower, more administrative. A future without the fun.
This is where Fisher's hauntology becomes useful, precisely because it is so often misused. Hauntology, for Fisher, was never mere nostalgia. It was being haunted by futures that were promised and never delivered — the persistent sense that the timeline we're standing on is the wrong one. GTA 2, reencountered now, is a small museum of such futures. Its aesthetic dialect — pixelated neon, corporate ziggurats, Hare Krishnas swinging baseball bats, Scientists in lab coats running drug labs — was confident enough about tomorrow to commit to it in vector sprites. The cruel irony is that in trading this aesthetic for photorealistic Americana, the GTA series quietly buried its own most speculative instincts. GTA III and every entry since swapped Anywhere City's weird elsewhere for the specific, branded nowhere of a fantasy New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. The franchise became more "realistic" precisely by becoming less capable of imagining an alternative. You can measure the slow cancellation of the future in the distance between Anywhere City and Los Santos.
Then there is the Zaibatsu Corporation, the game's dominant gang and ambient weather system. Zaibatsu does not simply sell drugs or run rackets in the manner of ordinary organized crime. Zaibatsu is everything. It controls the police. It owns the press. It sells both the weapons and the medicine. You cannot defeat it; you can only negotiate your position inside it. In 1999, this was received as camp dystopian excess, vaguely indebted to Neuromancer and RoboCop. Twenty-odd years on, it reads as a perfectly workable diagram of our actual political economy. Capitalist realism — Fisher's term for the widespread sense that capitalism is not merely the best system but the only imaginable one — hangs over Anywhere City like humidity. The protagonist, Claude Speed, never rebels against the Zaibatsu. He works for them. He also works for everyone they are fighting. The job is the ontology. Resistance, where it exists, is simply a different subcontract.
This is also where the gameplay itself becomes legible as inadvertent commentary. The core loop of GTA 2 is grind: take a mission, complete the mission, earn respect with one gang, watch your respect drop with another, take another mission. Every act is extracted and converted into a currency that determines what further acts are permitted. Fisher's idea of "depressive hedonia" — the condition of a subject who cannot stop pursuing pleasure but has ceased to expect satisfaction from it — finds a strange early mascot in the GTA 2 player. You drive too fast. You kill too easily. The radio plays fake music broadcast by fake DJs, and the entire apparatus exists to prevent you from ever stopping. When Fisher writes about the erosion of attention under networked capitalism, about subjects structurally deprived of the capacity to sit with anything, he is not describing video games. He might as well be.
What makes the game specifically Fisherian, rather than merely dystopian-adjacent, is the texture of its affect. GTA 2 is not apocalyptic. It is not sorrowful. It is grimy, bathetic, cheerfully nihilistic in the precise mode that the late 90s specialized in and that the internet has since refined into its resting face. The cutscenes are shot with real actors on VHS-grade video, like a public-access show that wandered into a snuff film. Everyone is a grifter. Every mission is a scam. There is no outside to the scam, no redeeming authority, no critique that isn't itself a smaller scam. This is not quite cynicism, because cynicism requires a memory of something better. It is something flatter and more contemporary: the affective default of people born after the end of history who don't feel the loss as a loss. Fisher called versions of this reflexive impotence. You can feel it in GTA 2 the way you feel weather.
The game's current status sharpens all of this. GTA 2 is remembered, when it is remembered, as a transitional artifact — a step on the way to the "real" Grand Theft Auto, the one that started making the billions. That framing is itself capitalist realism at work: it converts everything prior to commercial apotheosis into mere prelude, into a rough draft that the market has thankfully corrected. But the reason GTA 2 retains interest — the reason small communities still mod it, still run it on emulators, still argue about it — is precisely that it represents a road not taken. It imagined a GTA that was weirder, more speculative, more willing to let gangs be Hare Krishnas and corporations be named Zaibatsu and cities be called Anywhere. The franchise that swallowed it became much more powerful by becoming much less strange. This is the hauntological structure rendered in miniature: a lost future inside a single intellectual property, buried by its own successor.
To play GTA 2 in 2026 is therefore to encounter a doubled loss. You are looking at an imagined future that didn't come, made by a studio that no longer exists in that form, inside a franchise that has become the photographic negative of what this entry hinted it might be. And yet the diagnosis the game accidentally offers — that the Zaibatsu owns everything, that the job is the self, that the city is anywhere and therefore nowhere, that the radio is always on and nothing can be listened to — has aged considerably better than most of what has been released since. We did not escape Anywhere City. We just got better textures.
There is a particular kind of cultural object that becomes more interesting the more it is forgotten. Grand Theft Auto 2, released by DMA Design in 1999 on the exact cusp of everything that was about to happen, is one of these. Wedged between its scruffy 2D predecessor and the civilization-shifting 3D of GTA III, it now lingers as a kind of embarrassed middle child in a franchise that has become a culture industry unto itself. Almost nobody plays it anymore. Almost nobody needs to. And yet returning to it today, you find something stranger and more revealing than the mature Rockstar product machine seems capable of producing — a game that was, almost by accident, diagnosing the present we eventually got.
The setting is "Anywhere City" — a name so flat and functional it might have been generated by a Mark Fisher concordance. It is a late-90s vision of a near-future that the late 90s assumed would arrive: neon, corporate compounds, gang territories, grainy cyberpunk gestures filtered through the budget of a top-down engine. Promotional materials positioned it as taking place "three weeks into the future," which, like most sincere predictions from that moment, now reads as accidentally profound. Because the future GTA 2 gestured toward — gleefully lawless, policed by private corporations, colonized by esoteric gangs — didn't arrive, at least not in the form the game imagined. What arrived instead was flatter, slower, more administrative. A future without the fun.
This is where Fisher's hauntology becomes useful, precisely because it is so often misused. Hauntology, for Fisher, was never mere nostalgia. It was being haunted by futures that were promised and never delivered — the persistent sense that the timeline we're standing on is the wrong one. GTA 2, reencountered now, is a small museum of such futures. Its aesthetic dialect — pixelated neon, corporate ziggurats, Hare Krishnas swinging baseball bats, Scientists in lab coats running drug labs — was confident enough about tomorrow to commit to it in vector sprites. The cruel irony is that in trading this aesthetic for photorealistic Americana, the GTA series quietly buried its own most speculative instincts. GTA III and every entry since swapped Anywhere City's weird elsewhere for the specific, branded nowhere of a fantasy New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. The franchise became more "realistic" precisely by becoming less capable of imagining an alternative. You can measure the slow cancellation of the future in the distance between Anywhere City and Los Santos.
Then there is the Zaibatsu Corporation, the game's dominant gang and ambient weather system. Zaibatsu does not simply sell drugs or run rackets in the manner of ordinary organized crime. Zaibatsu is everything. It controls the police. It owns the press. It sells both the weapons and the medicine. You cannot defeat it; you can only negotiate your position inside it. In 1999, this was received as camp dystopian excess, vaguely indebted to Neuromancer and RoboCop. Twenty-odd years on, it reads as a perfectly workable diagram of our actual political economy. Capitalist realism — Fisher's term for the widespread sense that capitalism is not merely the best system but the only imaginable one — hangs over Anywhere City like humidity. The protagonist, Claude Speed, never rebels against the Zaibatsu. He works for them. He also works for everyone they are fighting. The job is the ontology. Resistance, where it exists, is simply a different subcontract.
This is also where the gameplay itself becomes legible as inadvertent commentary. The core loop of GTA 2 is grind: take a mission, complete the mission, earn respect with one gang, watch your respect drop with another, take another mission. Every act is extracted and converted into a currency that determines what further acts are permitted. Fisher's idea of "depressive hedonia" — the condition of a subject who cannot stop pursuing pleasure but has ceased to expect satisfaction from it — finds a strange early mascot in the GTA 2 player. You drive too fast. You kill too easily. The radio plays fake music broadcast by fake DJs, and the entire apparatus exists to prevent you from ever stopping. When Fisher writes about the erosion of attention under networked capitalism, about subjects structurally deprived of the capacity to sit with anything, he is not describing video games. He might as well be.
What makes the game specifically Fisherian, rather than merely dystopian-adjacent, is the texture of its affect. GTA 2 is not apocalyptic. It is not sorrowful. It is grimy, bathetic, cheerfully nihilistic in the precise mode that the late 90s specialized in and that the internet has since refined into its resting face. The cutscenes are shot with real actors on VHS-grade video, like a public-access show that wandered into a snuff film. Everyone is a grifter. Every mission is a scam. There is no outside to the scam, no redeeming authority, no critique that isn't itself a smaller scam. This is not quite cynicism, because cynicism requires a memory of something better. It is something flatter and more contemporary: the affective default of people born after the end of history who don't feel the loss as a loss. Fisher called versions of this reflexive impotence. You can feel it in GTA 2 the way you feel weather.
The game's current status sharpens all of this. GTA 2 is remembered, when it is remembered, as a transitional artifact — a step on the way to the "real" Grand Theft Auto, the one that started making the billions. That framing is itself capitalist realism at work: it converts everything prior to commercial apotheosis into mere prelude, into a rough draft that the market has thankfully corrected. But the reason GTA 2 retains interest — the reason small communities still mod it, still run it on emulators, still argue about it — is precisely that it represents a road not taken. It imagined a GTA that was weirder, more speculative, more willing to let gangs be Hare Krishnas and corporations be named Zaibatsu and cities be called Anywhere. The franchise that swallowed it became much more powerful by becoming much less strange. This is the hauntological structure rendered in miniature: a lost future inside a single intellectual property, buried by its own successor.
To play GTA 2 in 2026 is therefore to encounter a doubled loss. You are looking at an imagined future that didn't come, made by a studio that no longer exists in that form, inside a franchise that has become the photographic negative of what this entry hinted it might be. And yet the diagnosis the game accidentally offers — that the Zaibatsu owns everything, that the job is the self, that the city is anywhere and therefore nowhere, that the radio is always on and nothing can be listened to — has aged considerably better than most of what has been released since. We did not escape Anywhere City. We just got better textures.
Mini Review: Forgotten between 2D roots and 3D hits, 1999’s GTA 2 is an artifact of a lost future. Set in dystopian Anywhere City under the Zaibatsu Corp, it’s a speculative vision the franchise abandoned for branded Americana. Viewed through Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, the game accidentally diagnosed our present. Its endless gig-grind and cheerful nihilism proved prophetic. We never escaped Anywhere City; we just got better textures.