‘Grand Theft Auto III’ at 25 - The Game That Built the Open World
25 years ago today, a UK-based team of developers shipped a PlayStation 2 game that completely changed what people expected from a video game. DMA Design, now known as Rockstar North, released Grand Theft Auto III on October 23, 2001, and the open world games that followed have been working from its template ever since.
The first two Grand Theft Auto games, released in 1997 and 1999, were top-down affairs. They had a great idea at their core: here’s a city, go cause trouble. But the missions never added up to much, and the limited top-down perspective made it hard to see where you were driving. Grand Theft Auto III kept the freedom and removed the limitations. It put you on the ground in a fully 3D Liberty City, a fictionalized pastiche of New York City, with a real story and a reason to care about the jobs you were taking. Rockstar Games’ English co-founder and franchise mainstay Dan Houser wrote the game’s story and oversaw it alongside Scottish producer Leslie Benzies, who had previously been DMA Design’s lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley, released in 1998. The pitch inside Rockstar for Grand Theft Auto III, famously, was “Zelda meets Goodfellas”, and that’s a better summary of the premise than I could ever come up with.
The story is simple by design. You play as Claude, a small-time crook who never says a word. His girlfriend Catalina shoots him and leaves him for dead during a bank job, but instead he survives, gets arrested, then escapes when the Colombian Cartel happens to ambush his prison transport in order to kidnap one of the other prisoners. With the game taking significant inspiration from crime films such as Scarface, Heat, and the aforementioned Goodfellas, you control Claude as he works his way up the Liberty City underworld, taking jobs from the Leone Family Mafia, the Yakuza, and a handful of crooked businessmen and officials as the city’s entire criminal underworld finds itself under threat from Catalina and the Colombian Cartel she’s risen to the top of. It’s a revenge story, and it’s also a story about how nobody in a world of criminals can be trusted. Almost every alliance turns sour, and when Claude finally gets his revenge on Catalina, there isn’t much satisfaction in it, as befitting the crime drama genre.
But the other half of the game’s narrative is pure satire, with the in-game radio stations being the best example. The talk station is full of paranoid, shouting callers, and the ads make fun of consumer culture, pharmaceutical hype, and everything else in sight. The legitimate businessmen and politicians in the story turn out to be no better than the gangsters, just better dressed, while the characters who are involved in organized crime are mostly petty, scared, and ridiculous, which is a pretty sharp take on the whole gangster movie honor code. The joke is that crime isn’t a break from society in Liberty City. It’s what the rest of society looks like with the polish removed.
Liberty City itself does a lot of the storytelling. The city is comprised of three islands, and you get access to each of them as the story progresses. You start out in the grimy industrial areas and red-light district of Portland. Then you progress to the skyscrapers of Staunton Island, then finally to the suburbs of Shoreside Vale. Even when Claude stands still, traffic keeps moving, pedestrians keep walking, and the day-and-night cycle keeps progressing with an indifference that reinforces the idea that Claude is a man the city doesn’t notice.
In 2001, that sense of a living world was the thing that got everyone’s attention, and it’s hard to overstate how much of a leap forward for the medium it was. Little touches that didn’t need to exist were everywhere. Side missions become available when you steal a taxi, a cop car, or an ambulance. Cars lose their hoods and bumpers as they get beaten up. The police response ramps up with your wanted level, from a single cop on your tail all the way to the military. And none of it is required. The game is fun if you follow the missions, and it’s equally fun if you ignore them and make your own mess, which was something the earlier games never managed.
Rockstar didn’t skimp on the presentation, either. The voice cast is full of recognizable names, with Frank Vincent, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Madsen, Michael Rapaport, Kyle MacLachlan, and Debi Mazar all on board. Radio stations cover everything from hip-hop to classical, and the sound design makes the whole city feel real. The characters themselves are mostly broadly-defined crime movie types, and Claude, as a silent protagonist, is more of a blank slate than a personality. But the cast sells it, and Liberty City is the real star anyway. When the game was released, GameSpot critic Jeff Gerstmann wrote:
“Rockstar and DMA Design have obviously spent some time making sure that Grand Theft Auto III is a quality product, and that quality shows in everything, from the graphics, to the sound, to the plot points, to the gameplay itself. Unlike previous games in the series, the game is extremely fun whether you play it as it was intended to be played or eschew the game’s intended mission structure and set out on your own to wreak havoc throughout the city. While the violent nature of the game will surely turn some people off and kids simply shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it, Grand Theft Auto III is, quite simply, an incredible experience that shouldn’t be missed by anyone mature enough to handle it.”
The “mature enough” part mattered, because this was a violent, profane game that was written for adults, and that was a big reason for the controversy around it at the time. But the controversy certainly didn’t seem to hurt it, because Grand Theft Auto III went on to become the second-best-selling video game of 2001, behind only Madden NFL 2002, and it won that year’s Interactive Achievement Awards (now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards) for Outstanding Achievement in Game Design and Outstanding Technical Achievement. Houser and Benzies stayed with the series all the way through 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V before eventually leaving Rockstar. Each went on to form their own independent studio, with Benzies founding the ill-fated Build a Rocket Boy in 2018, which shut down earlier this year after the catastrophic critical and commercial failure of its only game MindsEye, while Houser founded Absurd Ventures in 2021 and is currently focused on developing new and original open world action-adventure games. But the series that Houser and Benzies helped build has only gotten bigger over the past 25 years, with its next entry Grand Theft Auto VI arriving next month and already expected to be one of the biggest launches in the history of the medium.
Dan Houser himself acknowledged in a recent interview:
“GTA has become part of the wider cultural fabric. I mean, you sort of saw that on YouTube clips and whatever else that would have the HUD on it, and people using the logo and things like that. When you go to any big tourist resort, you’ll have a sort of GTA cover art-inspired T-shirt available. So you began to see that creep in 10 years ago, so I suppose.”
Grand Theft Auto III is available on modern consoles, PC, and mobile as part of the remastered compilation Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. If you’ve never played it, it’s well worth experiencing for the first time. And if you have, you already know what it did for gaming, because 25 years later to the day, you’ve no doubt seen it in every open world video game made since then.