For those of you old enough to play GTA 1 and GTA 2, how popular was the series then before GTA 3?

[think-man]

Huge, I remember everyone used to talk about it when I was a kid, at a school gala a kid brought his ps1 along and was charging us $1 for 5 mins on GTA 1 xD I think my parents gave me $10 for the day as spending money and I gave it all to him so I could play it for as long as possible.