The Man with the Phone

Early in Watch Dogs you stand on a pavement, hold up a phone and look at strangers.

That's the game's best idea, and it's in the first hour. Point at a passer-by and a small box opens beside them with a name, a job and one line of private detail, drawn from the city's records. You're not told what to do with this. You can steal from their account, which the game permits, or you can walk on. The unease is the point, and it's mostly a good one.

Watch Dogs is a third-person open-world game made by Ubisoft Montreal, released in May 2014 for the machines of the day, and it arrived with an enormous amount of hope attached. It had been planned as a showpiece for the new generation of consoles and slipped to the spring. When it came out, a row about whether the final graphics matched the 2012 demonstration filled the pages that should have gone to its ideas. Ubisoft said the visuals had not been downgraded. It sold more than ten million copies by the end of 2014, and review aggregation put it at 77 on PC and 80 on PlayStation 4. A hit, then. A hit that people were curiously quick to forget.

The art: a city you can play like an instrument

Set in a fictionalised Chicago close to its own present, the game gives you Aiden Pearce, a grey-hat hacker who turns vigilante after his niece is killed. The city runs on ctOS, a network that links its cameras, traffic lights, bridges, cash machines, trains and phones into one system. Aiden's phone talks to all of it.

This is where the game earns its marks. Chase a car and you raise a bollard in its path. Get pinned down and you drop a bridge, or fire a steam pipe, or black out a block. The city, which in most open-world games is wallpaper, becomes a set of switches. It's a clever reversal of the genre's usual power fantasy. The player's strength lies in knowing the building, not in carrying the biggest gun. Within an hour of starting, you are listening for the hum of a junction box the way you'd once listened for footsteps.

The rest is less inventive. Pearce is the hard part to forgive: a man in a cap, a mask and a long coat, who treats his niece's death as a licence and is meant to be taken as a hero. The story keeps wanting to be about surveillance and keeps being about revenge. Driving and gunplay are competent and unremarkable, borrowed from the games that Ubisoft was trying to dethrone. Hacking itself is mostly a button press with a nice animation on top. The ideas are bigger than the verbs.

It's a handsome piece of work all the same. The Chicago of the Steam promotional shot is a damp, brown, golden-lit city of alleys and fire escapes and elevated trains, and a night run along the L is the game at its best. Score it as a good, ambitious, overstuffed first attempt at something new. That's a 6.9, and it's a respectable 6.9.

The prophecy: the watcher you play

Watch Dogs is a game about surveillance that makes you the surveiller. That's both its hook and its limit. The bad people have the system; you borrow it. Because you are the one holding the phone, the game never asks what it means for anyone to hold it. The 2020s asked that question, loudly, and got an answer the game didn't anticipate.

It did anticipate a good deal else. Its release came a year after the NSA revelations of 2013, and coverage at the time said they lent the game a topicality that its marketing couldn't have bought. Check the claims against the record, and you find four threads.

The joined-up city. ctOS is one operating system for everything. The real thing is a patchwork. Chicago did build one of America's largest camera networks, Operation Virtual Shield, which has been reported as linking more than 3,000 cameras to a central monitoring system, with facial recognition added. But nobody has built the single brain. Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs tried to build a sensor-rich district on Toronto's waterfront, and abandoned it in May 2020 after years of argument about who would own the data. The game imagined a city that was one machine. Real cities turned out to be a drawer full of vendors who do not talk to each other.

The hijacked street. Here the game was a few years behind the researchers, not ahead of them. In 2014, a University of Michigan team took control of nearly 100 networked traffic signals, with the road agency's permission, using a laptop and a radio, because the links were unencrypted and the passwords were defaults. A year later, two researchers took over a Jeep Cherokee on a motorway through its internet connection, and Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles. These were demonstrations, with the owners' consent. Nobody has yet reported a lone vigilante steering a city. But the mechanism Watch Dogs dramatises, a weak default on a roadside box, is real, and it has not gone away.

The risk score. The game's ctOS flags people it considers likely to commit crimes. Chicago's own police department ran something close. The Strategic Subject List, known as the heat list, assigned people a score for the likelihood of being involved in a shooting. A RAND study reported in 2016 that people on the list were no more likely to be shot than a comparison group. The department shut the programme down on 1 November 2019 when its federal grant ended, and the city's Inspector General published an advisory the following January. The real list was worse than the game's and less dramatic: a spreadsheet, officers given only vague guidance on what to do with it, and no mastermind in sight.

The profile. The player's phone can pull up a stranger's file. The nearest real equivalents are sold to institutions. Clearview AI built a database of billions of face images from the internet and sold it to police until a 2022 settlement stopped it selling to private companies and individuals. In January 2025 the FTC finalised orders against two data brokers, Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla, over the sale of sensitive location data. The game imagines the surveillance as a heroic gadget. In practice it was a market.

The reading

The sequels tried to repair the original's problem. Watch Dogs 2 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, put the hackers in a collective and made the villain a company, Blume, whose ctOS 2.0 spies for profit. Watch Dogs: Legion moved to London in 2020, where a private military company has turned the city into a surveillance state. They're better aimed at the real target. They are also the proof that the first game missed it.

What Watch Dogs got right was the interface, one that turns a city into something you can touch, tap and ask questions of. In the mid-2020s, we all have a version of that phone. What it got wrong was the hero. Everyone who built these systems in real life believed they were solving a problem, and none of them had Pearce's coat. The game's most lasting image is the profile box over a stranger's head. It is good enough for a T-shirt and not much else.