I’m a HUGE fan of Grand Theft Auto, and have been since it’s initial release on the Playstation. To me, GTA is more of an RPG than a game of bloody horrors, as the media tried to portray it. Roaming freely through the expansive, open city, running from mission to mission, it all just seemed like an RPG with a modern day crime theme to it. I personally own almost every GTA released across many different platforms, and to be totally honest I only wanted my PS2 so I could play Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories (though it is good for other games too!).

Back when Sony released the PSOne, Rockstar released the GTA Collector’s Edition, a boxed 3 disc collection including the first Grand Theft Auto, London 1969 expansion pack and Grand Theft Auto 2. I’ve never owned this collection because I already own both GTA and GTA 2 for the Playstation and never felt the need to buy the whole thing just for London 1969. I think fate had another reason for why I would never buy the collection, as I’ve had many chances to buy London on it’s own before this purchase. You may be wondering by now why I’m devoted an entire Sam’s Scores to just one thing that possibly everyone owns and had probably forgotten about…

In the store the box was taped shut so that the cases couldn’t be removed or fall out, so when I got home I had to make sure I didn’t just buy a box of empty cases. To my surprise all 3 games were inside, albeit in the wrong cases, but everything was there. What I happen to find in one case got my collector’s juices flowing!

This collection had a different label on the top of the CDs than the normal GTA games, so that you could never just stick the normal GTA games in these cases and pass them off as the collection. Only 2 of mine were the collector’s label, the other…BLANK! Yes, my copy of the first Grand Theft Auto had absolutely no label on top of the CD what so ever.

My mind quickly thought to test the CD to make sure it was real and sure enough GTA played without any problems at all. I thought to myself this had to be rare, perhaps some kind of promotional ticket from Rockstar much like Wonka’s golden ticket? I wasn’t sure what to make of it so I fired off an email to Rockstar to find out.

Through 3 different support members at Rockstar I’ve gathered this game shouldn’t be like this and it may be a real 1 in a million error disc that missed the printing process, somehow. After talking to co-writer Will, he informed me that there were companies that made black CD-Rs that looked much like the Playstation discs. Could this game be a hoax cooked up by someone? I’m not sure anyone has broken the original PS booting scheme to create a disc that boots flawlessly like this one, but I may be wrong.

Whether this is an extremely rare error or just a practical joke created by someone, I don’t care because either way it plays Grand Theft Auto without any problems. If nothing else I own 2 parts of the collection, and I will probably keep an eye out for a single copy of the collector’s edition GTA. Even though the box is a little beat up I’m still excited to have it, because the whole collection came at an extremely cheap price.