2001 video game
Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 action-adventure game developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games. It is the third main entry in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, following 1999's "Grand Theft Auto 2", and the fifth instalment overall. Set within the fictional Liberty City (loosely based on New York City), the story follows Claude, a silent protagonist who, after being left for dead by his girlfriend during a robbery, embarks on a quest for revenge leading him to become entangled in a world of crime, drugs, gang warfare, and corruption. The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. Its open world design lets players freely roam Liberty City, consisting of three main areas.
Development was shared between DMA Design, based in Edinburgh, and Rockstar, based in New York City. Development involved transforming popular elements from the "Grand Theft Auto" series into a fully 3D world for the first time. The game was delayed following the September 11 attacks to allow the team to change references and gameplay deemed inappropriate. "Grand Theft Auto III" was released in October 2001 for the PlayStation 2, in May 2002 for Windows, and in November 2003 for the Xbox. Mobile ports were released for the tenth anniversary in 2011, followed by for the twentieth in 2021.
"Grand Theft Auto III" received critical acclaim for its concept, gameplay, sound design, and visual fidelity, but generated controversies for its violence and sex. It received year-end accolades from several gaming publications, and it is considered a landmark game in the open world concept, one of the sixth generation of console gaming's most significant titles, and among the best video games ever made. It became the best-selling video game of 2001 and among the best-selling PlayStation 2 games with over 11.6 million copies sold; it has sold over 14.5 million copies overall. The game was followed by "" (2002) and two prequels, "Advance" (2004) and "Liberty City Stories" (2005).
Gameplay.
"Grand Theft Auto III" is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. It is possible to have several missions available at a time, as some missions require players to wait for further instructions or events. Outside of missions, players can freely roam the game's open world, and have the ability to complete optional side missions. Liberty City is composed of three boroughs: Portland, Staunton Island, and Shoreside Vale; the latter two areas become unlocked as the player progresses through the storyline.
Players may run, jump or use vehicles to navigate the game's world. In combat, auto-aim can be used as assistance against enemies. Should players take damage, their health meter can be fully regenerated through the use of health pick-ups. Body armour can be used to absorb gunshots and explosive damage, but is used up in the process. When health is entirely depleted, gameplay stops and players respawn at the nearest hospital, at the expense of losing armour, weapons, and an amount of money.
If players commit crimes while playing, the game's law enforcement agencies may respond as indicated by a "wanted" meter in the head-up display (HUD). On the meter, the displayed stars indicate the current wanted level (for example, at the maximum six-star level, efforts by law enforcement to incapacitate players become very aggressive). Law enforcement officers will search for players who leave the wanted vicinity. The wanted meter enters a cooldown mode and eventually recedes when players are hidden from the officers' line of sight.
The game lets players control the mute criminal Claude. Throughout the story, Claude meets various players from the criminal underworld. As players complete missions for different gangs and criminal organisations, fellow gang members will often defend players, while rival gang members will recognise players and subsequently shoot on sight. While free roaming the game world, players may engage in activities such as a vigilante minigame, a firefighting activity, a paramedic service and a taxi cab service. Completion of these activities grants players with context-specific rewards; for example, completing the vigilante mission allows players to bribe police after committing a crime.
Players use melee attacks, firearms and explosives to fight enemies. The firearms include weapons such as the Micro Uzi, an M16 rifle and a flamethrower. The game's three-dimensional environment allows a first-person view while aiming with the sniper rifle, rocket launcher and the M16 rifle. In addition, the game's combat was reworked to allow players to commit drive-by shootings by facing sideways in a vehicle. The game gives players a wide variety of weapon options—they can be purchased from local firearms dealers, found on the ground, retrieved from dead enemies, or found around the city.
Plot.
Small-time criminal Claude is betrayed and shot by his girlfriend Catalina (voiced by Cynthia Farrell) during a bank heist outside Liberty City. Claude is arrested but escapes during his transfer to prison when members of the Colombian Cartel ambush his transport to abduct another prisoner. During his escape, Claude befriends explosives expert and fellow convict 8-Ball (Guru), who shelters Claude and introduces him to the Leone Mafia family for work. Claude assists the Mafia with various operations, including winning a gang war against a local group of Triads, earning him the respect of Don Salvatore Leone (Frank Vincent). After learning the Cartel are creating and selling a new street drug called SPANK to fund their expansion into Liberty City, Salvatore orders Claude to destroy their floating drug lab. Claude accomplishes this with 8-Ball's help.
Salvatore later instructs Claude to deal with a minor problem, but his trophy wife Maria (Debi Mazar), who took a liking to Claude, reveals it to be a set-up. Maria claims she lied to Salvatore about having an affair with Claude to make him jealous, and now Salvatore wants to kill him. Claude escapes to Staunton Island with Maria and her friend Asuka Kasen (Lianna Pai). After killing Salvatore to cut ties with the Mafia, Claude begins working for the yakuza, led by Asuka and her brother Kenji (Les J.N. Mau). During this time, he also provides assistance to corrupt police inspector Ray Machowski (Robert Loggia), whom he eventually helps flee the city, and influential businessman Donald Love (Kyle MacLachlan). Donald hires Claude to kill Kenji under the guise of a Cartel attack to start a gang war to allow Donald to obtain construction sites for his businesses. After the job's success, Claude carries out another task for Donald that leads him to encounter Catalina, now the leader of the Cartel, at a construction site. However, Catalina escapes after betraying and shooting her partner, Miguel (Al Espinosa).
Asuka blames the Cartel for Kenji's death and seizes the construction site. The yakuza capture the wounded Miguel and torture him for information on Cartel operations in the city, allowing Claude to strike against them and hinder the Cartel. Enraged, Catalina murders both Asuka and Miguel and kidnaps Maria, demanding $500,000 for her release. Claude meets with her to pay the ransom, but Catalina deceives him again and traps him. Claude escapes, rescues Maria, and destroys the helicopter Catalina attempts to flee in, killing her. As Claude and Maria leave the scene, the latter begins to complain about the kidnapping, but is silenced by a gunshot.
Development.
The core development team of "Grand Theft Auto III" consisted of about 23 people at DMA Design in Edinburgh, who worked closely with publisher Rockstar Games in New York City. The original tech demo was created on Sega's Dreamcast around the end of development on "Grand Theft Auto 2" (1999). Rockstar had been pressuring its teams to create a 3D open world, and the DMA group who developed "Space Station Silicon Valley" (1998) began working on a project separate from the "Grand Theft Auto 2" team. Alan Jack, a DMA support engineer, described it as combining "Body Harvest"'s (1998) exploration with "Space Station Silicon Valley"'s city level.
The team chose against using the "Grand Theft Auto" branding to avoid conflict with the "Grand Theft Auto 2" team and began developing their game as a "Godzilla" project. After Take-Two Interactive acquired DMA from Infogrames in September 1999, the "Space Station Silicon Valley" and "Grand Theft Auto 2" teams were combined. The combined team began developing "Grand Theft Auto III" for the Dreamcast, but shifted to the PlayStation 2 after four months. Technical director Obbe Vermeij said the shift was not due to hardware constraints, but because it became clear the Dreamcast was not commercially viable. He described the decision as disappointing, noting the DMA Design staff were big fans of "Phantasy Star Online" (2000).
During the Dreamcast phase, DMA Design developed city blocks with brownstones, docks, and retail areas, alongside vehicles and pedestrians. By early 2001, the team had designed the city, cars and some weapons. Producer Leslie Benzies described "Grand Theft Auto III" as a "crime simulation game". Rockstar offered "Grand Theft Auto III" to Microsoft Game Studios as an Xbox exclusive, but Microsoft declined due to its adult nature and poorly-performing predecessors. The game was released for the PlayStation 2 on 23 October 2001 in North America. When porting the game to Windows, the team delayed it from the PlayStation 2 release in order to ensure quality, citing issues with the simultaneous platform release of previous "Grand Theft Auto" games. Capcom published the game in Japan on 25 September 2003.
Design.
"Grand Theft Auto III" is the first 3D game in the series, using Criterion Games's RenderWare game engine. Executive producer Sam Houser had always wanted the series to move to 3D, and DMA Design had experimented with 3D worlds in games like "Body Harvest" and "Space Station Silicon Valley". With the release of the PlayStation 2, the team felt a large 3D world was possible. Art director Aaron Garbut felt other video games at the time "were a thing you played", wanting "Grand Theft Auto III" to be "a place you lived in". An online multiplayer mode was planned, but dropped due to time and resource limitations.
When designing the game, the development team expanded upon concepts introduced in the previous "Grand Theft Auto" games. Benzies said the intention was to recreate the "freedom and diversity" of the previous games in a "living, breathing 3D world", using the power of the PlayStation 2 to do so. The console's ability to use DVDs, an improvement over the PlayStation's limit to CDs, allowed the team to store more data, such as animations, music and environments. Despite this, the team found it difficult to fit the game into the PlayStation 2's 32 megabytes of RAM, due to the scale. The game's size also created difficulties for the testers, due to the variety of options. Benzies felt creating a living city was the "underlying principle" of the game's concept during development. Sam Houser felt the game's 3D element allowed the "chemistry of the team [to come] together perfectly for the first time".
A major difficulty the team encountered was converting all game elements into a fully 3D world, including the sound and radio stations, as well as designing and voicing the non-player characters, due to the amount that existed within the open world. Producer Dan Houser said there were about 8,000 lines of recorded dialogue in the game, while audio programmer Raymond Usher estimated about 18,000. The basic technical elements of the game began to work together in mid-2000, with a carjacking mechanic prototype and stable streaming model. Streaming was initially intended to be reserved for music and map geometry, but other elements were eventually included when it became apparent to the team as more data was entered.
When designing the game world, the team initially created a "hybrid city", which Dan Houser described as "a post industrial Midwest slash east coast generic" city. Upon developing within this game world, the team realised basing the design on a real location meant "you have a lot of things you can say about it". As a result, they redesigned Liberty City, which had been previously featured in the first "Grand Theft Auto" (1997), basing it loosely on New York City. DMA Design worked with a team at Rockstar in New York for cultural references; the Rockstar team would regularly work long hours for full weeks, ensuring the references, such as in-game car manufacturers, were appropriate to the city.
The city is broken into three islands: an industrial section representing Brooklyn and Queens, a