Grand Theft Auto III
Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 action-adventure game developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games. It was the first 3D game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Set in Liberty City, loosely based on New York City, the story follows Claude, a silent protagonist who becomes 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.
Development was shared between DMA Design, based in Edinburgh, and Rockstar, based in New York City. Development involved transforming popular Grand Theft Auto elements into a fully 3D world for the first time. The game was delayed following the 11 September 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 a remastered version for the twentieth in 2021.
Grand Theft Auto III received acclaim for its concept, gameplay, sound design, and visual fidelity, but generated controversies for its violent and sexual content. It received year-end accolades from several gaming publications, and it is considered a landmark game in the open world concept, one of the most significant games of the sixth generation of consoles, and among the best video games ever made. It was 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 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and two prequels, Advance and Liberty City Stories.
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 to select from at a time, as some missions require players to wait for further instructions or events. Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world and complete optional side missions. They begin in the borough of Portland, and as they progress through the storyline, they unlock Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale.Players may run, jump or use vehicles to navigate the game world. In combat, auto-aim can be used as assistance against enemies. Should players take damage, they can regenerate their health meter with health pick-ups. Body armour can be used to absorb gunshots and explosive damage, but is depleted in the process. When health is completely 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. 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.
Players control the mute criminal Claude. Throughout the story, Claude meets various characters 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 service. Completion of these activities grants context-specific rewards to the player; for example, completing the vigilante mission allows players to bribe police after committing a crime, reducing the wanted level by one star per bribe.
Players can 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 scattered around the city.
Plot
Small-time criminal Claude is betrayed and shot by his girlfriend Catalina 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, 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. 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, who has taken a liking to Claude, reveals it to be a set-up. Maria claims she told Salvatore that she was 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, the co-leader of the yakuza. After killing Salvatore to cut ties with the Mafia, Claude begins working for the yakuza. During this time, he also provides assistance to corrupt police inspector Ray Machowski, whom he eventually helps flee the city, and influential businessman Donald Love.
Donald hires Claude to kill Asuka's brother 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. Asuka suspects 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 Catalina to pay the ransom, but she 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, Maria 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 Grand Theft Auto 2s development in 1999. Rockstar had been pressuring its teams to create a 3D open world, and the DMA group behind Space Station Silicon Valley began working on a project separate from the Grand Theft Auto 2 team. Alan Jack, a DMA support engineer, described it as combining Body Harvests exploration with Space Station Silicon Valleys city level.The team decided 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 initially 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.
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 the poor sales of its predecessors. The game was released for the PlayStation 2 on 23 October 2001 in North America. The team delayed the Windows version until after the PlayStation 2 release to ensure it was a high quality port, citing issues with the simultaneous platform release of previous Grand Theft Auto games. Zoo Corporation published the English version of the game in Japan for Windows on 28 June 2002; after the publishing deal expired, Capcom published a Japanese-language version for the PlayStation 2 and Windows on 25 September 2003.
Design
Grand Theft Auto III is the first 3D game in the series, using Criterion Games's game engine, RenderWare. 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 in 2000, the team believed a large 3D world was finally possible. Art director Aaron Garbut felt that other video games at the time "were a thing you played", whereas he wanted Grand Theft Auto III to be "a place you lived in". A planned online multiplayer mode was dropped due to time and resource limitations.File:Gta3-pc-stealing.jpeg|thumb|Grand Theft Auto III is the first game in the series to use a third-person perspective view, positioning the camera closer to the player character.
When designing the game, the development team expanded upon concepts introduced in the previous Grand Theft Auto games. Benzies said the intent was to recreate the "freedom and diversity" of the previous games in a "living, breathing 3D world", using the power of the PlayStation 2. The console's support for DVDs, an upgrade from the PlayStation's compact disc format, gave the developers more storage space for animations, music and environments. Despite this, the team felt constrained by the PlayStation 2's 32 megabytes of RAM, due to the scale of the game. Its size also created difficulties for the testers, due to the variety of scenarios they needed to validate. Benzies believed that creating a living city was the "underlying principle" of the game's concept during development. Sam Houser felt that the game's 3D element allowed the "chemistry of the team together perfectly for the first time".
The developers encountered difficulty with integrating all facets of the game into a fully 3D world, such as the sounds and radio stations, as well as designing and voicing the large number of non-player characters present in the open world. Producer Dan Houser said there were about 8,000 lines of recorded dialogue, while audio programmer Raymond Usher estimated about 18,000. The developers had the basic technical elements of the game working together by mid-2000, with a prototype of the carjacking mechanic and a stable streaming model. Streaming was initially intended only for loading music and the map geometry, but its scope expanded to include other elements when the team realised there was more game data to process.
For the design of the game world, the developers initially created a "hybrid city", which Dan Houser described as "a post industrial Midwest slash east coast generic" city. Once the team began developing the game within this world, they realised that 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, to be loosely based on New York City. DMA Design worked with a team at Rockstar in New York for cultural references; the Rockstar team regularly worked long hours for entire weeks to ensure 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 commercial centre resembling Manhattan, and suburbs similar to New Jersey. The islands unlock as the story progresses; the team wanted players to "start out feeling poor and work to being richer". Dan Houser described Liberty City as a "hybrid of a generic American city", including Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. He felt the parallel realism of the world allowed the team to make more social commentary. Sam Houser cited films and shows like Heat and The Sopranos as inspiration for the setting and wanted to emulate them in the game. He also cited the influence of the Legend of Zelda franchise, the video game Super Mario 64, and the film Goodfellas, describing Grand Theft Auto III as "a cross between a gangster movie and an RPG".