Dispatch
This Day In Gaming - October 22: Grand Theft Auto III
game
Grand Theft Auto III
Dispatch
game
Grand Theft Auto III
Keep Reading
BombjackSome games sell well. Some games sell well and get a sequel. And then, every so often, a game turns up that quietly moves the goalposts for everyone else, then nicks a car and drives off with them.
Grand Theft Auto III is very much in that last group. It landed on PlayStation 2 in North America in October 2001, and it didn't just give us a game. It gave us a city, a radio dial full of nonsense, and the deeply irresponsible freedom to do whatever we fancied inside it.
If you're planning to light a candle for Liberty City today, you should know that the internet can't quite agree on which day to light it.
Most of the gaming press and the wider community celebrate 22 October 2001 as release day. It's the date GameSpot lists as the game's first release, and it's the date we use on VGDB too. Wikipedia, on the other hand, plumps for 23 October 2001 for the North American PS2 launch.
So that's a one day difference, and I'm not going to pretend there's a tidy answer when there isn't. Over here in the UK and Europe we had to wait until 26 October 2001 anyway, so frankly we were never in the running. Whichever date you go with, this is the week Liberty City opened its doors.
GTA III was made by DMA Design, the Scottish studio that would later be renamed Rockstar North, and published by Rockstar Games. The development team was in Edinburgh, a long way from the New York City that inspired the game.
Its origins are a bit of a surprise. Around 1999, as Grand Theft Auto 2 was wrapping up, the team built a 3D tech demo on Sega's Dreamcast. After roughly four months, they moved the whole thing over to Sony's shiny new PlayStation 2. Technical director Obbe Vermeij has said the switch wasn't about the Dreamcast's hardware being too weak; it was simply that the console didn't look commercially viable. Which, looking back, was a fair read of the room.
A core team of around 23 people at DMA built a living, breathing 3D city. Some studios need that many people to approve a logo.
That team worked closely with Rockstar's New York office. Leslie Benzies produced, Sam Houser was executive producer, Aaron Garbut led the art, and the script came from Dan Houser alongside James Worrall and Paul Kurowski. Under the bonnet sat RenderWare, the engine from Criterion Games, and the developers spent a lot of time fighting the PS2's 32MB of RAM to keep an entire city ticking over at once. 32MB. There are emails in my inbox bigger than that.
The release was rocked by real world events. Following the September 11 attacks, Rockstar announced on 19 September 2001 that GTA III would be pushed back by three weeks while the team went through the game and made changes.
The police cars, originally a blue and white scheme that looked an awful lot like NYPD vehicles, were repainted black and white. A plane's flight path was adjusted so it no longer appeared to fly behind a skyscraper, a mission involving terrorists was removed, and some pedestrian dialogue and talk radio were reworked. The original cover art was swapped out in North America too, although Europe kept it, so for once we got the cooler version. Rockstar later described the finished game as being about 1% different.
It's worth adding that plenty of "cut content" stories have grown around GTA III over the years, and Rockstar has shot down several of them. So if you read something on a forum that sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The earlier Grand Theft Auto games, including the original Grand Theft Auto, were played from a top down view, looking at tiny cars like a slightly menacing pigeon. GTA III dropped the camera down behind your character and handed you a fully 3D Liberty City, spread across three islands and loosely based on New York.
You could follow the story missions, or you could ignore them completely and just... live there. Drive around. Cause chaos. Pinch an ambulance and do paramedic missions for a bit. Or simply sit in traffic flicking between radio stations, including Chatterbox FM, the call-in talk station hosted by Lazlow, which was funnier than a lot of actual comedy.
That feeling of a world you could inhabit, rather than just complete, is what GTA III is remembered for. It's the reason "open world" became the default setting for half the industry.
Reviewers went properly weak at the knees. The PS2 version holds a Metacritic score of 97 out of 100 from 56 reviews, which ties it with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 as the highest rated PS2 game on the site. A skateboarding game and a crime spree sharing the top spot is the most 2001 thing imaginable.
IGN and GameSpot both gave it 9.6 out of 10, and Eurogamer went the whole hog with a perfect 10. GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann summed it up as an incredible experience that nobody should miss, provided they were mature enough to handle it. Which, judging by how many of us were playing it, was a very generous interpretation of "mature". It also scooped Game of the Year at the 2nd Game Developers Choice Awards in 2002, along with the award for Excellence in Game Design.
The sales numbers were just as daft. GTA III was the best selling video game of 2001 in the United States, and by 2008 it had sold more than 14.5 million copies across all platforms, with around 11.6 million of those on PS2 alone.
It then did what all good GTA games do and refused to go away. It reached Windows in May 2002, Xbox in late 2003, and later Mac, mobile devices for its tenth anniversary in 2011, and a whole parade of re-releases after that.
Of course, with success came the pearl clutching. GTA III drew fierce criticism for its violence and sexual content, and it became a lightning rod in the wider "are video games corrupting the youth?" debate. None of it slowed the game down one bit. If anything, being told you shouldn't play something has never once made a teenager less likely to play it.
Today, GTA III is widely regarded as a landmark in open world gaming, one of the most important releases of the sixth console generation, and a regular fixture on "greatest games of all time" lists. In 2016 it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play, and you can trace its DNA through pretty much every open world game that followed.
Here's a bit of trivia to impress your mates with. The main character in GTA III doesn't have a name on screen. He also never says a single word in his own game, which is a bold choice for a man who spends most of it getting double crossed.
He wasn't officially identified as Claude until his cameo in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004. Strong, silent and nameless for three years. Proper leading man material.
GTA III isn't the only birthday on 22 October. Fittingly, Grand Theft Auto 2 launched on PC and PlayStation on 22 October 1999, exactly two years before its big brother changed everything. And for something completely different, WWE 2K20 came out on 22 October 2019, a game that is remembered for very different reasons.
But if you want the day's true headliner, it has to be the silent bloke who gave us Liberty City.
No comments yet. Be the first.
