Print Works, Love Fist, and the missions I still think about twenty four years later

Not a nostalgia dump, a question about what makes a mission stick.

The Print Works was mandatory to finish the game and it was also just a building you bought that made money. I remember it because it was mine.

The Love Fist missions were a rock band being idiots and me driving them around. I remember them because they were funny and because nothing else in the game was quite like them.

Neither is a spectacle. Neither has a set piece. What they have is ownership in one case and character in the other, and I would bet a lot that the missions people remember from this one in 2050 are the same two categories rather than whatever the biggest explosion is.