Best Retro Open World Games

Retro Open World Games: Exploration Before the Genre Existed

The “open world” genre category didn’t exist in the 1990s. Players described their experience differently — sandbox, exploration, nonlinear — and the games that established open world design did so without the vocabulary or genre conventions that subsequent open world games built on. Shenmue’s simulated city, GTA’s top-down crime sandbox, Zelda’s overworld exploration, and Super Mario 64’s open-hub level design were each solving the same problem (how do you give players meaningful freedom?) in different ways, with no shared framework.

Retro open world games tend to be smaller than modern open world games — the hardware constraints of the 1990s didn’t accommodate the map scale of Grand Theft Auto V — but many are more carefully designed. Freedom in a small, well-considered space is different from freedom in a large, procedurally-filled one, and the retro examples often produce the former.

Shenmue — The City as a Character

Shenmue (1999) constructed a quarter of a square kilometer of Yokosuka, Japan, in obsessive detail. Each building had an interior. Each resident had a schedule. Each shop had hours. The weather changed daily. Ryo Hazuki could examine every object in his house, talk to every NPC, play capsule toy machines, work a forklift, practice Kung Fu moves in empty lots.

The game’s openness was vertical rather than horizontal — the map was small but the density of interaction within it was unprecedented. Shenmue’s definition of “open world” — a simulated social environment rather than a large landscape to traverse — influenced subsequent games differently than GTA’s influence. The distinction between “open world as simulation” and “open world as traversable landscape” runs through subsequent game design to the present.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — The Open Hub

Ocarina of Time (1997) solved the transition from 2D Zelda’s overworld to 3D by structuring the game as connected spaces — Hyrule Field, Kakariko Village, Death Mountain, Lake Hylia, Zora’s Domain — that could be explored non-linearly within the constraints of item gating. Hyrule Field itself wasn’t large by later standards, but it communicated open possibility in a way that 2D Zelda’s sprite-based overworld hadn’t.

The game’s day-night cycle, which changed NPC schedules and enemy populations, prefigured later open world time simulations. The side quests (trading sequence, Gold Skulltula hunting, minigame completion) gave Hyrule depth beyond the main quest. Ocarina of Time’s specific vision of openness — carefully structured freedom in a handcrafted world — influenced the Zelda series’ design philosophy to the present.

Driver — The Open City Before GTA III

Driver (1999) placed players in four open city environments — Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York — that could be explored freely between missions. The cities were smaller than GTA III’s Liberty City (2001) and lacked GTA’s on-foot exploration, but they were the first open city driving sandboxes on PlayStation.

Driver’s film director mode, which let players replay completed missions from cinematic camera angles and edit the footage, was an early example of game content creation tools in a mainstream title. The parking garage test mission — which required demonstrating stunt driving skills before the game began properly — became one of gaming’s most notorious gatekeeping mechanics, filtering out players who hadn’t mastered Driver’s specific physics model before they could access the game’s content.

A Link to the Past — The Open World Prototype

A Link to the Past (1991) remains the strongest argument that open world design doesn’t require 3D space. The overworld — Light World and Dark World alternating versions of the same Hyrule — gave players a map large enough to get lost in, secrets numerous enough to reward exploration, and a structure (find items, unlock areas) that made the openness feel purposeful.

Link’s Awakening (1993) compressed A Link to the Past’s formula for the Game Boy with a smaller map that was proportionally denser with secrets. Both games demonstrate that “open world” is fundamentally about the relationship between player freedom and world structure, not map size or polygon count.