Anyone and everyone that ever played PC games had GTA 2 among the people I met.
So, popular.

I remember having a Demo from Playstation UK magazine which had like 5 mins of GTA1 myself and a mate played it to death.... in fact GTA was the first game I bought on the Psone when I got the console, I still have my copy of it next to my CD player since you can just chuck it in and listen to the radio stations off the disk hah.

Odd fact! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYy69qOJWoM Joyride which most people would have heard for their first time in GTA3 was in the first game but uncensored, the term "fucked on crack" was bleeped over in 3 with a radio voice clip of "'Lips' on crack" and the "don't fuck with me" was removed entirely, so as much as GTA3 was more graphic it's music was censored compared to the original.

Edit - the gta3 version of it, far less naughty - http://youtu.be/fRB-scg5Sw8?t=15m39s

It was extremely popular, but anywhere near the 3D-GTAs on PS2 and forward. Since Mortal Kombat accelerated a lot of the discussions about violence in videogames, GTA was a hot topic aswell. Problem back then was piracy in a much bigger way.

Was funny that the psone could play a CD-R with a copied game by swapping out the disks just as the copy protection screen appeared, but to be honest I've a Harddrive sitting on my wii with 500gb of games on it which suggests that piracy is still fairly big today and with file sharing and internet speeds being a hell of a lot faster I would infact say it's bigger today than ever.

About as popular as god of war at its height or a little better, I'd say.

Ironically, it was really big on the PC back then! Playstation got a port later on. It wasn't massively popular but I still enjoyed the first one more than the fourth one...

It was a popular core title. Nowhere near as huge as it is now and that was all down to GTA3. It was also much bigger on PC... oh how times change.

I never played the orginal 2 games. I did'nt even know about gta3,until somebody told me about it one day,then I bought it and been a fan of the franchise ever since. that was over 10 years ago.

I'm born in 1994 but i remember playing these games at an internet cafe in the early 2000s. Pretty popular but it was vice city that blew things out of the water 

It was a novelty game, mostly on the PC. I can remember the first time someone showed it to me, a bunch of us were watching and laughing. It was funny how you were the bad guy and could run over people and steal cars. The graphics were simplistic but kinda neat how the city would scroll... 2D but with depth. But that was it. It seemed like a fluff game that you could fool around with, chuckle, and be done with it. I'm actually shocked how big the series became. It really took off with Vice City. The real-world 80's theme was so unique for gaming at the time. It really appealed to non-gamers, and the ads were awesome with the Flock of Seagulls tune. That game was massive, EVERYONE knew what it was.