Edge could not get a review copy of Grand Theft Auto III, so it bought one from a shop. Its review, in the Christmas 2001 issue, called the move into three dimensions “a shrewd and rewarding step” and caught what the game was about: “it’s all about owning the streets, strutting your territory and walking tall”. The earlier Grand Theft Auto games had shown their cities from overhead. This one put the player on the pavement of Liberty City, a New York–like city of three islands, free to take missions from its gangsters or to steal any car in sight and drive off. It was made by a studio that had nearly fallen apart, it came out six weeks after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and it became the best-selling game in America over the following year.
Fast facts
- Developer: DMA Design, Edinburgh, which became Rockstar North in 2002; credited in Edge to “Rockstar/DMA”.
- Publisher: Take-Two Interactive, on its Rockstar Games label.
- Released: October 2001 on the PlayStation 2; PC in May 2002; Xbox, in a double pack with Vice City, from late 2003.
- Technology: Criterion’s RenderWare middleware, with DMA’s own streaming code for the city.
- Setting: Liberty City, three islands opened up one at a time as the story goes on.
- Sales: about eight million copies by December 2002, according to Take-Two.
A studio that had shrunk
Take-Two had bought DMA Design at the end of 1999 and moved it from Dundee to Edinburgh, and most of the staff left. Edge reported at the time that the studio, despite its 3D experience on Body Harvest and Wild Metal Country, needed middleware “to bring the team up to speed”, and chose Criterion’s RenderWare: “Waiting 12 months for the development of a game engine and tools wasn’t an option.” The RenderWare entry tells that side of the story.
Dan Houser, the game’s co-writer and co-producer at Rockstar in New York, looked back on those years for Edge in 2011. “DMA was in turmoil when we began the game, having shrunk to around a dozen guys in the months after becoming part of Rockstar,” he said, “with very few people believing this game could be made.” At its core were Leslie Benzies, Aaron Garbut and Adam Fowler, who went on to be the series’ producer, art director and technical director, and Obbe Vermeij, who had just finished DMA’s Space Station Silicon Valley. By Houser’s recollection the team was about 22 people in Scotland and perhaps six in New York.
Almost nothing carried over from the earlier games. “The only mechanic we kept was the carjacking,” Houser said, “and the only other things we really kept were the ideas of an open, non-linear city and the radio. Everything else had to be made from scratch.” RenderWare drew the world, but Edge credited DMA’s own streaming technology, which loaded the city from the disc as the player moved through it, with making Liberty City possible.
Liberty City
Edge’s preview in October 2001 described the game: the player’s “would-be wise guy is fresh out of jail and clearly far from reformed”, and takes jobs from gang bosses to earn money and reputation across “three large city zones”. Every crime raised a wanted level, and the police responded harder as it rose, “culminating with SWAT teams”. The islands, Portland, Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale, open up one after another as the story goes on, and each has its gangs, among them the Mafia, Triads, Yardies and Yakuza.
The hero never speaks and is not named in the game; a caption in Edge’s 2011 retrospective called him “the man with no name — at least at first”. He was later given the name Claude. The talking was left to everyone else. Rockstar hired film actors, among them Kyle MacLachlan, Robert Loggia, Michael Madsen and Joe Pantoliano, while, Houser said, just four people performed all the motion capture. The cut-scenes used the game’s own engine.
Then there was the radio. “Sam [Houser] really wanted a radio system that gave the sensation of really flicking through the dial of a radio,” Dan Houser told Edge, with music and “personality”. In any vehicle the player could flick through a spread of stations. The talk-radio station, written with the American radio host Lazlow Jones, who also voiced it, was the last thing the team wrote. Edge’s review found the stations “veering from the sardonic to the satirical”.
After 11 September
Rockstar’s office was in New York, close to Ground Zero, and the attacks came weeks before the game was due out. Rockstar delayed it and changed some of its content; PC Gamer listed it in December 2001 among the games whose content was being adjusted after the attacks. Houser told Edge in 2011 that the changes were “very cosmetic”, and that most of the delay, “only a couple of weeks”, came from the office being close to Ground Zero:
“We changed the colour of the cop cars so they weren’t identical to NYPD, we altered the flight path of a plane so that it didn’t look like it was flying into or behind a skyscraper, and we removed one mission as it made a reference to terrorists, plus a few lines of pedestrian dialogue and a line or two of talk radio.”
Rockstar said much the same in a question-and-answer piece on its own website for the game’s tenth anniversary: the game was only “1% different”. The biggest change was the American box, whose original art the company thought “too raw” after the attacks. One of Rockstar’s artists redrew it in an evening, Houser said, and the new design set the look of every Grand Theft Auto box that followed. Europe kept the original cover.
Reviews
Edge admired the city, which felt “both intricate and robust”, and the radio, but disliked the “awkward” close combat and found “a lamentable lack of freedom for your own criminal genius”: the player could only follow other people’s plans. Its review was printed with a score of six out of ten. In the next issue Edge explained that “due to a production error” the score had been wrong, and that “the correct Edge rating was eight out of ten”. Ten years later the magazine included even that among the times “our reviewers get it wrong”, calling it a “not-particularly-enthusiastic 8/10”.
The buyers did not wait for the critics. By February 2002 Edge was reporting that the game had been given a platinum award by ELSPA, the British publishers’ association, for more than 300,000 sales in Britain. Take-Two’s annual report for the year to October 2002 said that it had been the best-selling video game in the United States, on any format, in both money and units, and the best-selling PlayStation 2 game in North America and Europe since the console’s launch, with about eight million copies sold. It brought in 30 per cent of Take-Two’s sales that year, and the PC version another 3.1 per cent. Edge put the total at more than 15 million copies by 2011.
Australia
In Australia the game was refused classification in November 2001, which took it off the shelves. The classification board objected to a sequence in which the player could pick up a prostitute and then attack her. Take-Two appealed, the board upheld the ban on 11 December 2001, and a version with the scenes removed went on sale in January 2002 with an MA15+ rating.
First of its kind?
Grand Theft Auto III is often called the first open-world 3D game, but its makers claimed less than that. Dan Houser said that “this game was among the first to figure it out”, naming the streaming of data from the disc, cut-scenes rendered in the game engine and the move from driving to walking in a single animation. Retro Gamer pointed out that DMA’s own Body Harvest on the N64 “was doing the open-ended, free-roaming, vehicle-borrowing genre long before GTA III arrived on the scene”, and that the game’s day and night cycle and weather effects were not the first either.
Its influence is easier to show. By late 2002 PC Gamer was describing a driving game based on Starsky & Hutch as a “GTA III challenger”. In 2011 Edge wrote that open worlds, “virtual societies streamed from disc, with cluttered roads, pavements and airwaves”, had become “a part of every major publisher’s portfolio”.
What came next
DMA Design became Rockstar North in 2002 and followed the game with Vice City only a year later, which Edge credited to RenderWare’s flexibility, and San Andreas in 2004. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) returned to a new Liberty City, and Grand Theft Auto V (2013) has sold more than 230 million copies; the Rockstar North entry follows the series to Grand Theft Auto VI. Grand Theft Auto III itself was converted for the PC in 2002 and the Xbox in 2003, and a tenth-anniversary version for iOS and Android phones and tablets came out in 2011.
Sources
- Edge issue 102, October 2001: Grand Theft Auto 3 preview (the jailbird hero; gang bosses; three city zones; the wanted level and SWAT teams; radio stations).
- Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001: review (no review code; the move to 3D; Liberty City; the radio; close combat; “lamentable lack of freedom”; “owning the streets”; the printed six out of ten); middleware feature (DMA’s move, the loss of staff, RenderWare, “Waiting 12 months”).
- Edge issue 106, January 2002: the correction (“The correct Edge rating was eight out of ten”) and the scores table (Grand Theft Auto III, “Rockstar/DMA”, 8).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 103, December 2001, p. 12: games altered after the attacks, among them “Take 2’s Grand Theft Auto 3”.
- Edge issue 107, February 2002: ELSPA platinum awards, “signifying sales of over 300,000”, including Grand Theft Auto III.
- Computer Gaming World issue 218, September 2002: strategy guide (Portland, Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale; unlocking the second island; the Mafia and Triads).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 113, September 2002: the PC version in the chart; issue 115, November 2002: Starsky & Hutch, the “GTA III challenger”.
- Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) Christmas 2003: Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City confirmed for Xbox.
- Take-Two Interactive, annual report on Form 10-K for the year to 31 October 2002 (public record): release in October 2001 and PC release in May 2002; share of net sales; best-selling PS2 game in North America and Europe; “approximately eight million units”; top-selling game in the US for fiscal 2002, according to NPDFunworld. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/946581/000112528202003845/b320556.htm
- Stuart Hunt, “The History of Grand Theft Auto”, Retro Gamer issue 50, 2008: Liberty City based on New York; Body Harvest; day and night and weather “wasn’t the first”.
- “Liberty City Story”, Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, from p. 90: Dan Houser on DMA’s size, the team, the carjacking, streaming and cut-scenes, the cast and motion capture, the radio and Lazlow, 11 September and the box art; Edge on its 8/10, “over 15m copies”, RenderWare and DMA’s streaming, open worlds; the tenth-anniversary version for iOS and Android.
- “Ban on Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 3 upheld in Australia”, Gamasutra (now Game Developer), 13 December 2001 (web, secondary): the ban upheld; Take-Two’s revised version for January 2002. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/ban-on-rockstar-s-i-grand-theft-auto-3-i-upheld-in-australia
- Refused-Classification.com, “Banned & Censored Games of 2001–2002” (web, secondary): refused classification on 28 November 2001; the board’s reasons; appeal upheld 11 December 2001; modified version rated MA15+ in January 2002. https://www.refused-classification.com/censorship/game/banned-05/
- “9/11 changed Grand Theft Auto III, but only a tiny bit”, Kotaku, 5 January 2012 (web, secondary), quoting Rockstar’s “Grand Theft Auto III: Your Questions Answered – Part Two” on the Rockstar Newswire: “1% different”; the box art “too raw”. https://kotaku.com/9-11-changed-grand-theft-auto-iii-but-only-a-tiny-bit-5873417
- Edge issue 216, July 2010: GTA’s loyalty to RenderWare and Vice City, as set out in the RenderWare entry. The Rockstar North entry gives the sources for the later games and their sales.
- Wikipedia, “Grand Theft Auto III” (web, secondary): the protagonist silent and unnamed in the game, and later called Claude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_III