The Low Culture Essay: Kyle MacNeill on The Getaway

In this month's subscriber essay, Kyle MacNeill loads up The Getaway, a perfectly preserved simulator of London in the early 00s

“She's not the slightest bit squeamish about a bit of claret.” Outside my penthouse flat, a gang of mercenaries are squabbling about how to kidnap my son. As I get to the window, I see them shoot my wife and snatch the kid before bundling into a red Jensen Interceptor. My wife dies into my arms, gasping a dying request: “Get our son back.” Fight and flight fuse together and I jump into my green Alfa Romeo, in hot pursuit of the Jensen. Pumping techno soundtracks the chase, sounding for all the world as if Luke Slater had done the soundtrack for Goldeneye.

And so The Getaway begins. Set in central London, the PS2 game follows ex-con Mark Hammond enacting his revenge on mob boss Charlie Jolson. It’s basically a Guy Ritchie film, but you’re the playable main character. The game was originally slated for a 2000 release, to coincide with the launch of the PS2 console. But setbacks led to it being pushed back until December 2002. It sold decently, with 300,000 copies shifted within two weeks and it even bodied Grand Theft Auto: Vice City off the top of the charts. According to Next Generation, it was the 53rd best-selling game released between 2000 and 2006. But while Next concluded that it “did seem to strike a chord,” the game ultimately didn’t deliver the lasting impact of a knockout hit.

Now, though, a reappraisal is gathering speed online. Three years ago, it attracted attention when Tom The Taxi Driver (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), a cabbie and YouTuber, revisited the game and described it as “bang on” in terms of its accuracy. It’s this rendering of early 2000s London that makes The Getaway so special. The game projects a hyper realistic simulation of the capital’s streets into your living room, from Michael Ball posters in the West End to Dixons, The Link to Virgin Megastore, old Routemasters to retro police cars. It's basically a perfectly preserved snapshot of a particular London era. Somehow, though, I’d never played it before. So, a few weeks ago, I managed to procure a copy of The Getaway for a tenner on eBay. I slotted it into the dusty drive of my old PS2 and kickstarted the story mode.