You remember that opening scene. Snoop Dogg is just... there. He's a playable character for some reason. The year was 2003, and Activision was trying to take a massive bite out of Rockstar’s dinner. They didn't just want a slice; they wanted the whole plate. True Crime: Streets of LA was the result, and honestly, it’s one of the weirdest, most ambitious, and deeply flawed games to ever hit the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era.
It was supposed to be the "GTA Killer." That's what the magazines called it.
But it wasn't a clone. Not really. While Grand Theft Auto was about being the bad guy, True Crime put you in the shoes of Nick Kang, a loose-cannon detective with a penchant for martial arts and destroying public property. It was basically a love letter to 90s Hong Kong action cinema dropped right into the middle of a 1:1 recreation of Los Angeles.
The Ambition of a Digital Los Angeles
Luxoflux, the developers, did something insane. They mapped out roughly 300 square miles of LA. This wasn't a stylized, condensed version of the city. They used GPS data to recreate the grid. If you lived in Santa Monica at the time, you could technically drive to your own street. Sure, the buildings were mostly generic blocks and repeated textures, but the scale was terrifying for the early 2000s.
Compare that to GTA: Vice City, which came out a year prior. Vice City felt alive, but it was tiny. True Crime felt infinite and strangely empty at the same time. You’d be driving down Sunset Boulevard for what felt like actual hours.
The driving physics? They were heavy. Chunky.
You could feel the weight of the car, but the minute you hit a curb, physics sort of gave up. It was janky. But that was the charm. You weren't playing a polished masterpiece; you were playing a high-octane experiment. Nick Kang could jump out of a moving car, move into a slow-motion dive, and fire twin pistols like he was in a John Woo flick. It felt cool. It felt different.
The Combat: Three Games in One
The Streets of LA game didn't just want you to drive. It wanted you to fight. And shoot. And sneak.
The developers tried to stitch three different genres together. One minute you’re in a standard third-person driving sim. The next, the camera shifts to a side-view, and suddenly you’re playing a simplified version of Virtua Fighter or Tekken. Nick had combos. He could do roundhouse kicks and grapple moves. For a sandbox game in 2003, having a dedicated martial arts system was unheard of.
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Then came the gunplay. It had a precision aiming system that let you target tires, fuel tanks, or even the hands of your enemies to disarm them. If you were "Good Cop," you’d shoot the gun out of their hand. If you were "Bad Cop," you’d just go for the head.
This morality system actually mattered. It wasn't just a bar that moved back and forth for flavor. Your "Good Cop/Bad Cop" rating changed the ending of the game. It changed how people reacted to you. If you were a total menace, the police would eventually try to take you down. It was a precursor to the honor systems we see in games like Red Dead Redemption, though significantly more primitive.
When Things Got... Weird
We have to talk about the branching paths. Most games back then were linear. If you failed a mission, you saw a "Mission Failed" screen and restarted. Not True Crime.
If you failed a chase, the story just kept going.
The narrative branched. You’d end up on a completely different mission thread because you let a suspect get away. It gave the game a weirdly authentic "live your own cop movie" vibe. But then, the story took a turn.
Usually, when people talk about the Streets of LA game, they mention the ending. Or rather, one of the endings. What starts as a gritty police procedural involving the Triads and the Russian Mob eventually devolves into... ancient demons? Fire-breathing dragons? Underground lava pits?
It was a sharp left turn into crazy town. Some players hated it. They wanted The Shield, and they got Big Trouble in Little China. But looking back, that willingness to be absolutely ridiculous is why people still remember Nick Kang. It wasn't trying to be "prestige" media. It was trying to be fun.
The Sound of 2003
The soundtrack was a time capsule. You had West Coast legends everywhere. Snoop Dogg, Westside Connection, Warren G. It wasn't just background noise; it was the soul of the game. Snoop was even a secret unlockable character if you collected enough "Dog Bones" throughout the city.
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Playing as Snoop Dogg, driving a custom car through a digital recreations of Compton, while his own tracks played on the radio—that was the peak of 2003 gaming culture. It was peak "cool."
Why It Disappeared
So, why aren't we playing True Crime 4 today?
The sequel, True Crime: New York City, was a bit of a disaster at launch. It was buggy. It felt rushed. The brand took a massive hit. Eventually, a third game was in development at United Front Games. It was going to be True Crime: Hong Kong.
Activision ended up canceling it. They didn't think it could compete in the modern market.
Square Enix eventually bought the rights to the finished assets, and that game became Sleeping Dogs. If you’ve played Sleeping Dogs, you’ve played the spiritual successor to True Crime. You can see the DNA everywhere: the focus on martial arts, the undercover cop drama, the brutal environmental takedowns.
But Sleeping Dogs is polished. It’s "good."
True Crime was "interesting." There’s a difference. True Crime had a rough-around-the-edges energy that felt like a B-movie with a blockbuster budget.
Does it hold up?
If you fire up an emulator or dig out your old PS2 today, the first thing you’ll notice is the fog. The draw distance is... well, it's not great. The city feels like it's being swallowed by a grey void every fifty feet.
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But once you start a random street brawl? Once you pull over a civilian car just to "frisk" them and find a bag of illegal "herbs"? The magic comes back. The game had a "Random Crimes" system that generated petty thefts and shootouts while you were just driving around. It made the world feel like it didn't revolve entirely around you.
The Streets of LA game was a victim of its own ambition. It tried to do everything at once and only did about 70% of it well. But that 70% was bold.
How to Revisit the Experience
If you're looking to scratch that itch for some early-2000s open-world chaos, you have a few options that aren't just hunting for an overpriced disc on eBay.
- Check out Sleeping Dogs (Definitive Edition): It is, for all intents and purposes, what True Crime would have become. The combat is arguably the best in any open-world game.
- Emulation is your friend: If you have the original media, PCSX2 (for PS2) or Dolphin (for the GameCube version) can upscale the resolution to 4K. Seeing that 300-square-mile map without the jagged edges of a 480i resolution is a revelation.
- The Soundtrack: Honestly, just go find the soundtrack on a streaming service. It’s a masterclass in early 2000s West Coast rap that still bangs.
The era of the "GTA Clone" is mostly over. Now, every open-world game is a "Ubisoft-style" map-clearer. We lost something when we stopped getting weird, experimental titles like True Crime. It was messy, it was loud, and it let you fight a dragon in the sewers of Los Angeles.
We need more of that energy in gaming today.
Stop looking for perfection. Go find the jank. Go find the games that tried too hard and failed in the most interesting ways possible. Nick Kang might be a forgotten relic to most, but for those who spent hours cruising that low-res digital 405 freeway, he’s a legend.
Don't bother looking for a remake. It’s never coming. The licensing alone for the music and the Snoop Dogg appearance would be a legal nightmare. Just appreciate it for what it was: a snapshot of a time when developers were still figuring out what "open world" actually meant.
The next time you’re playing a modern game and you see a perfectly animated character transition from a car to the sidewalk, remember True Crime. Remember Nick Kang clipping through a wall while doing a backflip. It wasn't perfect, but it was ours.
Keep an eye on the secondary markets. Prices for these "sixth-gen" gems are spiking. If you see a copy of True Crime at a garage sale for five bucks, grab it. It's a piece of history that deserves a spot on your shelf, right next to your oversized baggy jeans and your old burned CDs.
The Actionable Takeaway: If you want to experience the specific "multi-genre" feel of True Crime today, don't look for a modern clone. Instead, play Sleeping Dogs for the combat and L.A. Noire for the city atmosphere. Neither captures the specific brand of insanity found in the original Streets of LA game, but together, they represent the two halves of its DNA that survived the transition to the HD era.