Grand Theft Auto III

• 1. Introduction

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  Grand Theft Auto III began with an art director's complaint about the games of his day. Aaron Garbut felt that most of them were "a thing you played". He wanted this one to be "a place you lived in". The core team behind that ambition was small, about 23 people at DMA Design in Edinburgh, working closely with publisher Rockstar Games in New York City. Together they built a crime story set in a fictional city, with a silent criminal at its centre. This documentary asks how a separate project, begun under a different name on a different console, became a 3D city that players could roam at will. It asks what the team borrowed from gangster films and from other video games. It asks what a real-world tragedy forced them to change in the final weeks. And it asks why critics crowned the game while campaigners, retailers and courts argued over it.

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• 2. Dreamcast Origins

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  Around the end of Grand Theft Auto 2's development in 1999, a tech demo appeared on Sega's Dreamcast. It was the seed of a 3D game that did not yet carry the Grand Theft Auto name.

  Rockstar had been pressing its teams to build a 3D open world. The DMA group behind Space Station Silicon Valley, released in 1998, began a project separate from the Grand Theft Auto 2 team. Support engineer Alan Jack described it as the exploration of Body Harvest, also from 1998, joined to the city level of Space Station Silicon Valley.

  The team avoided the Grand Theft Auto branding to prevent conflict with the Grand Theft Auto 2 team. Instead they began developing the game as a Godzilla project. In September 1999, Take-Two Interactive acquired DMA from Infogrames, and the two teams were combined.

  The merged team started on the Dreamcast but switched to the PlayStation 2 after four months. Technical director Obbe Vermeij said hardware limits were not the reason. It had become clear that the Dreamcast was not commercially viable. He called the decision disappointing, noting that the DMA Design staff were big fans of Phantasy Star Online, released in 2000.

  During the Dreamcast phase, DMA Design built city blocks with brownstones, docks and retail areas, along with vehicles and pedestrians. By early 2001 the team had designed the city, the cars and some of the weapons. Producer Leslie Benzies described the project as a "crime simulation game".

  Rockstar offered the game to Microsoft Game Studios as an Xbox exclusive. Microsoft declined because of the game's adult nature and the poor sales of its predecessors. The PlayStation 2 version reached North America on the 23rd of October 2001. The team held the Windows version back until afterwards, because simultaneous releases on several platforms had caused problems for earlier games in the series.

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• 3. A Living City

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  Dan Houser first described the setting as a hybrid city, "a post industrial Midwest slash east coast generic" place. Once the team began building the game inside it, they saw that a real location gave them more to work with. As he put it, "you have a lot of things you can say about it". So they redesigned Liberty City, which had first appeared in the 1997 Grand Theft Auto, to be loosely based on New York City.

  Rockstar's New York team worked long hours, often for entire weeks, on the city's cultural references. One example was the choice of in-game car manufacturers, which had to suit the place. DMA Design in Edinburgh relied on them for that local knowledge.

  Liberty City is split into three islands. An industrial section stands in for Brooklyn and Queens, a commercial centre resembles Manhattan, and suburbs echo New Jersey. Players begin in the borough of Portland and unlock Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale as the story advances. The team wanted players to "start out feeling poor and work to being richer". Dan Houser added that the city also mixed in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Philadelphia. He felt this parallel realism allowed more social commentary.

  A six-star wanted meter shows how hard the police are hunting a player who has broken the law. At the top level, law enforcement becomes very aggressive. Hiding out of the officers' line of sight lets the meter cool down and slowly recede. Side activities include a vigilante minigame, a firefighting job, a paramedic service and a taxi service. Finishing the vigilante missions lets players bribe the police, lowering the wanted level by one star per bribe.

  When a player's health runs out, play stops and they respawn at the nearest hospital. The cost is lost armour, lost weapons and some money. Weapons range from the Micro Uzi and an M16 rifle to a flamethrower. Combat was also reworked so that players could fire from a moving vehicle by facing sideways, which made drive-by shootings possible.

  Sam Houser pointed to the film Heat from 1995 and the series The Sopranos, which ran from 1999 to 2007, as models for the setting. He also cited the Legend of Zelda franchise, Super Mario 64 from 1996 and the film Goodfellas from 1990. He summed the game up as "a cross between a gangster movie and an RPG".

  The engine was RenderWare, from Criterion Games. Sam Houser had always wanted the series to move into 3D, and the arrival of the PlayStation 2 in 2000 convinced the team that a large 3D world was finally possible. Its DVD support gave more room than the PlayStation's compact discs for animations, music and environments. Even so, the team felt cramped by the console's 32 megabytes of RAM. A planned online multiplayer mode was dropped for lack of time and resources. By mid-2000 the basic technical elements worked together, with a prototype of the carjacking mechanic and a stable streaming model. Streaming was first meant only for music and map geometry, but its scope grew once the team realised how much more game data there was to process.

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• 4. Claude and the Story

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  Claude is unnamed in the game, and his name is not officially revealed until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004. He never speaks in any of his appearances in the series. The team made him silent mainly because the choice "did not seem like a major issue" next to their other challenges. They also hoped players would identify with him and make him whoever they wanted. The developers had no "any one single inspiration" for him. They liked the idea of a "strong, silent killer, who would be juxtaposed with all of these neurotic and verbose mobsters".

  Dan Houser summed up the method in one line: "we use the story to expose the mechanics, and we use the mechanics to tell the story". He found the narrative hard to write, because the game is built around freedom of choice. He wanted something more nuanced than the generic "rise and fall and rise again of a superhero bad guy". He saw each mission as "its own short story" inside an "overarching story".

  Houser and co-writer James Worrall drew on the films The Warriors, Taxi Driver, Scarface and Payback. They also studied the mafiosos in Martin Scorsese's films. They met regularly with the designers and filled a room with post-it notes to construct the plot.

  The plot opens with Claude, a small-time criminal, shot by his girlfriend Catalina, voiced by Cynthia Farrell, during a bank heist in Liberty City. He is arrested but escapes when members of the Colombian Cartel ambush his prison transport to abduct another prisoner. Fellow convict 8-Ball, an explosives expert voiced by Guru, introduces him to the Leone Mafia family. His work earns the respect of Don Salvatore Leone, voiced by Frank Vincent. When the Cartel starts selling a new street drug called SPANK, Salvatore sends Claude to destroy their floating drug lab.

  Salvatore's wife Maria, voiced by Debi Mazar, then reveals that a car Claude was told to dispose of is a trap. She says she told Salvatore she was having an affair with Claude to make him jealous. Salvatore rigged the car with explosives in response. Claude escapes to Staunton Island with Maria and Asuka Kasen, voiced by Lianna Pai, a co-leader of the yakuza. After killing Salvatore to cut ties with the Mafia, Claude works for the yakuza. He also helps the corrupt police inspector Ray Machowski, voiced by Robert Loggia, flee the city. And he takes jobs from the businessman Donald Love, voiced by Kyle MacLachlan.

  Love hires Claude to kill Asuka's brother Kenji under the guise of a Cartel attack. The aim is to start a gang war that frees up construction sites for Love's businesses. Catalina, now the Cartel's leader, murders Asuka and her partner Miguel and kidnaps Maria, demanding $500,000 for her release. Around the same time, Claude finds Love's penthouse empty, with only an empty box left behind. Love and the convict from the prison transport have both vanished. Catalina deceives Claude again and traps him unarmed in the Cartel stronghold. He escapes, rescues Maria and destroys the helicopter in which Catalina tries to flee, killing her. As the two leave, Maria begins to complain about the kidnapping, until a gunshot abruptly silences her rant.

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• 5. Voices and Radio

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  Motion capture for the game was filmed at a rented studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Technical limits held it back, and the low polygon counts of the era hindered the cinematic movement the team wanted. Animating pedestrians as they entered and drove cars proved especially hard, because the vehicles varied so much. Software engineer Alan Campbell recalled, "It involved chaining together dozens of different animations and altering key frames in code".

  The game carries about three and a half hours of in-game radio. The team sought a broad range of music so players could hop between stations as they would in real life. Sam Houser described the talk stations as "a very iconoclastic look at America". Real DJs were cast, and the writers gave them unusual dialogue, aiming for "high production values and absurd content". Music director Craig Conner assembled the music, advertisements, DJ dialogue and station imaging.

  One station, Chatterbox FM, is entirely talk radio hosted by Lazlow Jones. He met Rockstar's managing director Terry Donovan in 2001, while both were preparing to travel to Los Angeles for E3. Donovan invited him to Rockstar's offices in Manhattan, where he met Dan and Sam Houser and producer Jamie King. They asked him to work on the game.

  The writing sessions took place at Dan Houser's apartment, and the whole process, including editing and recording, took around four to five months. The writers wanted to satirise American lifestyles through the station's guests and callers. They chose invented stories over news items that would quickly feel outdated. Jones's friends and neighbours played the guests, including his father, and the recordings were made in New York.

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• 6. After September 2001

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  On the 19th of September 2001, Rockstar delayed the game's release by three weeks, citing the attacks of the 11th of September as an influencing factor. Paul Eibeler, then president of Take-Two Interactive, noted how many people knew someone affected. The studio reviewed its titles and marketing and found small references and a couple of rare gameplay moments that no longer felt appropriate.

  The police cars were repainted. They had been blue with white stripes, resembling New York City Police Department livery, and became the black-and-white design common to several American police departments. The flight path of a plane was altered so it would not appear to fly into or behind a skyscraper. A mission referencing terrorists was removed, and some pedestrian dialogue and talk radio were changed.

  A character named Darkel was also cut. He was a revolutionary urchin who vowed to bring down the city's economy. When references to him turned up in the game's code, some speculated that his removal was linked to the attacks. Dan Houser explained that Darkel had been cut "months before" release. Rockstar likewise dismissed pre-release reports of schoolchildren among the pedestrians as "nonsense".

  Rockstar said the game was "about 1% different" after the attacks. The biggest change was the cover art. The original cover, still used for the European release, felt "too raw". It was replaced by what became the "signature style" of the series. Sam Houser said the new cover was designed in an evening and was instantly preferred. It drew on movie posters from 1960s films such as The Thomas Crown Affair, released in 1968.

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• 7. Acclaim and Backlash

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  Metacritic gave the PlayStation 2 version an average of 97 out of 100 from 56 reviews, a rating it calls universal acclaim. That ties it with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 as the highest-rated PlayStation 2 game on the site. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer called it "a luscious, sprawling epic". GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann called it "an incredible experience that shouldn't be missed by anyone". IGN's Doug Perry said the sound was "really approached as if it were done for a movie".

  Controls drew mixed reactions. Edge described the combat as "an awkward system that stymies play", and 1UP.com complained that targeting "often focuses on the wrong guy". Most reviewers still praised the driving.

  The Windows version scored 93 from 20 reviews, the highest of any Windows game from 2002. Reviewers liked the visual and control improvements but disliked the demanding system requirements. The mobile version scored 80 from 26 reviews. Destructoid's James Stephanie Sterling called its touchscreen controls "by far the biggest barrier toward enjoying" the port.

  The 2nd Game Developers Choice Awards named it Game of the Year, as did GameSpot and GameSpy. IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy and Game Revolution each named it Best PlayStation 2 Game. GameSpy also gave it Most Offensive Game of the Year, calling it "absolutely reprehensible".

  In the United States it was the highest-selling game of 2001. It passed 1.4 million units by December and two million by February 2002. Within a year it had sold six million copies. The United Kingdom awarded it the first "Diamond" award, marking over one million sales. In Italy it sold 75,000 copies in three months, more than fivefold its distributor's expectations. In Japan it sold around 75,000 copies on its first day. It reached 11.6 million copies on the PlayStation 2 and 14.5 million overall by March 2008.

  The notoriety led the American retailer Wal-Mart to check the identification of buyers who appeared under 17. In January 2002, the National Organization for Women called for Rockstar and Take-Two to withdraw the game, saying it "encourages violence and the degradation of women". Producer Leslie Benzies replied that the violence was meant to be comedic. Dan Houser said the team knew the game would offend but "never marketed it in a way that exploited that".

  Australia first classified the game MA15+, then banned it after a second review, citing sexual content and violence against prostitutes. The Office of Film and Literature Classification reaffirmed the ban on the 11th of December 2001. A modified version, without sexual acts with prostitutes, was released in January 2002. The game was re-rated R18+ in September 2019. In June 2005, Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan designated it "harmful" for children, which removed it from open shelves. The designation ultimately raised sales.

  On the 25th of June 2003, the teenage stepbrothers William and Josh Buckner shot at motorists, killing Aaron Hamel and wounding Kimberly Bede. They told investigators the game inspired them. On the 20th of October 2003, the victims' families filed a US$246 million lawsuit against Rockstar, Take-Two, Sony Computer Entertainment and Wal-Mart. The defendants argued in court that the game's ideas were protected by the First Amendment. The families' lawyer, Jack Thompson, tried to move the case into a state court under Tennessee's consumer protection act.

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• 8. Legacy and Afterlives

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  In 2007, GamePro named Grand Theft Auto III the most important video game of all time. IGN placed it among the "Top 10 Most Influential Games". In 2016, the Strong National Museum of Play inducted it into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

  The phrase "Grand Theft Auto clone" now describes any game with similar open-ended play. Crackdown, Mafia, Saints Row, True Crime and Watch Dogs all followed its lead. Earlier games had used open worlds, and Tom Bramwell argued that this one did not invent many of its features. In his words, it "brought them all together". Aaron Garbut credited it with leading to the complexities of Rockstar's later open world games, including Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018. IGN's Jack Harwood thought its talk radio inspired similar stations in Mafia III from 2016 and Watch Dogs: Legion from 2020.

  Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumers Association, called it the "lightning rod for the violence-in-games debate". Greg Ford of Electronic Gaming Monthly felt it let the medium handle mature subject matter more seriously, and noted that video game classification improved as a result of the controversy. Producer Jamie King said games were then often linked with children or nerds. The team "wanted the rest of the entertainment industry to pay attention".

  Vice City and San Andreas are set in 1986 and 1992. Grand Theft Auto Advance, from 2004, takes place in Liberty City about a year before the events of this game. Liberty City Stories, from 2005, is set three years before. A completely redesigned Liberty City appeared later in Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008.

  The game reached the Xbox, the console Microsoft had once refused it for, in Grand Theft Auto: Double Pack on the 4th of November 2003. That bundle paired it with Vice City. War Drum Studios ported it to iOS and Android on the 15th of December 2011 for the tenth anniversary. The Definitive Edition arrived on the 11th of November 2021 for the twentieth.

  A core team of six fans reverse-engineered the game and released it as an executable in April 2020, after working on it since 2016. Their project, re3, let the game be ported unofficially to platforms such as the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Vita and Wii U. Take-Two issued a DMCA takedown in February 2021, which was reversed in June after the team filed a counter-notice. In September 2021, Take-Two filed a lawsuit in California against the programmers.

  In July 2024, a fan developer called SKMP began work on a Dreamcast port. It was a significant undertaking because of the console's limited memory. It was released in December, bringing the game back to the machine where its first tech demo was built.

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