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Grand Theft Auto III
North American cover art
Developer(s)	DMA Design[a]
Publisher(s)	Rockstar Games
Producer(s)	Leslie Benzies
Programmer(s)	Obbe Vermeij Adam Fowler
Artist(s)	Aaron Garbut
Writer(s)	James Worrall Paul Kurowski Dan Houser
Composer(s)	Craig Conner Stuart Ross
Series	Grand Theft Auto
Engine	RenderWare
Platform(s)	PlayStation 2 Windows Xbox Mac OS X Android iOS Fire OS
Release	23 October 2001 PlayStation 2 NA: 23 October 2001 PAL: 26 October 2001 Windows NA: 21 May 2002 PAL: 24 May 2002 Xbox NA: 4 November 2003 PAL: 2 January 2004 Mac OS X 12 November 2010 Android, iOS 15 December 2011 Fire OS 15 May 2014
Genre(s)	Action-adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

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 betrayed and left for dead by his girlfriend during a robbery, embarks on a quest for revenge that leads 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. Much of the 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.

Grand Theft Auto III received critical acclaim, with particular praise directed at its concept and gameplay. However, it also generated controversy, with criticism directed at its depictions of violence and sex. It became the best-selling video game of 2001, and sold over 14.5 million copies by March 2008. Considered by many critics as one of the most significant titles of the sixth generation of video games and a landmark game in the open world concept, it is often listed among the greatest video games. It won several year-end accolades, including Game of the Year awards from several gaming publications.

Since its release, it has received ports to many different gaming platforms. An enhanced version of the game was released on mobile platforms in 2011 for the game's tenth anniversary, and a further enhanced version for the twentieth anniversary was released in 2021. The game was followed by 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, while two prequels, Grand Theft Auto Advance and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, were released in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

Gameplay[edit]

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.^[4] It is possible to have several missions available at a time, as some missions require players to wait for further instructions or events.^[5] 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.^[6]

Players may run, jump or use vehicles to navigate the game's world.^[7] In combat, auto-aim can be used as assistance against enemies.^[8] 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

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^[11] (for example, at the maximum six-star level, efforts by law enforcement to incapacitate players become very aggressive).^[12] 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.^[11]

The game lets players control the mute criminal Claude.^[13] During the story, Claude meets various new characters from gangs. 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.^[14] 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.^[11][15] 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.^[16]

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.^[6] 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.^[4] 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.^[9]

Plot[edit]

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 that 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 that she lied to Salvatore about having an affair with Claude to make him jealous, and now Salvatore wants to murder him. Claude escapes to Staunton Island with Maria and her friend Asuka Kasen (Lianna Pai). After assassinating 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 assassinate Kenji under the guise of a Cartel attack to start a gang war that will 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.^[b]

Development[edit]

Leslie Benzies

Dan Houser

Sam Houser

Benzies produced the game alongside Dan Houser, who also co-wrote the story. Sam Houser, president of Rockstar Games, executive-produced the game.

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.^[6] The original tech demo was created on Sega's Dreamcast around the end of development on Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999).^[17] 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.^[18]

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 that 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).^[18]

During the Dreamcast phase, DMA Design developed city blocks with brownstones, docks, and retail areas, alongside vehicles and pedestrians.^[18] By early 2001, the team had designed the city, cars and some weapons.^[19] Producer Leslie Benzies described Grand Theft Auto III as a "crime simulation game".^[6] 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.^[20][21] The game was released for the PlayStation 2 on 23 October 2001 in North America.^[22][23][24] 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.^[25] Capcom published the game in Japan in September 2003.^[26]

Design[edit]

Grand Theft Auto III is the first 3D game in the series,^[27] using Criterion Games's RenderWare game engine.^[28] Executive producer Sam Houser had always wanted the series to move to 3D,^[17] and DMA Design had experimented with 3D worlds in games like Body Harvest and Space Station Silicon Valley.^[29] With the release of the PlayStation 2, the team felt that a large 3D world was possible.^[29] Art director Aaron Garbut felt that other video games at the time "were a thing you played", wanting Grand Theft Auto III to be "a place you lived in".^[30] An online multiplayer mode was planned, but dropped due to time and resource limitations.^[31]

When designing the game, the development team expanded upon concepts introduced in the previous Grand Theft Auto games. Benzies stated that 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.^[6] 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.^[32] 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.^[5] Benzies felt that creating a living city was the "underlying principle" of the game's concept during development.^[6] Sam Houser felt that the game's 3D element allowed the "chemistry of the team [to come] together perfectly for the first time".^[33]

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.^[34] Producer Dan Houser said there were about 8,000 lines of recorded dialogue in the game,^[34] while audio programmer Raymond Usher estimated about 18,000.^[35] The basic technical elements of the game began to work together in mid-2000, with a carjacking mechanic prototype and stable streaming model.^[36] 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.^[5]

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.^[37] Upon developing within this game world, the team realised that basing the design on a real location meant "you have a lot of things you can say about it".^[37] 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.^[37] 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 that the references, such as in-game car manufacturers, were appropriate to the city.^[29]

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.^[38] The islands unlock as the story progresses; the team wanted players to "start out feeling poor and work to being richer".^[39] Dan Houser described Liberty City as a "hybrid of a generic American city", including Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia;^[39] he felt that the parallel realism of the world allowed the team to make more social commentary than previously.^[31] Sam Houser cited films and shows like Heat (1995) and The Sopranos (1999–2007) as inspiration for the setting and wanted to emulate them in the game.^[40] He also cited the influence of The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 64 and the 1990 film Goodfellas, describing Grand Theft Auto III as "a cross between a gangster movie and an RPG".^[41][42]

Story and characters[edit]

The team developed the story and design simultaneously. Dan Houser said, "we use the story to expose the mechanics, and we use the mechanics to tell the story";^[19] however, he found it difficult to create the narrative, as the game is so strongly focused on player freedom. He wanted the story to be more nuanced and interesting than the generic "rise and fall and rise again of a superhero bad guy".^[39] The game's script was also focused on mission objectives, attempting to implement high amounts of interactivity.^[36] Dan Houser felt that each mission is "its own short story", and part of an "overarching story".^[19] Dan Houser and co-writer James Worrall drew influence from mob films and the mafiosi featured in films by Martin Scorsese;^[36] the team also "paid a lot of attention" to shows like Miami Vice and The Sopranos.^[29] When writing the story, Dan Houser and Worrall regularly met with the designers, and filled a room with post-it notes to reconstruct the story components to shape the game.^[36]

Many of the game characters were animated using motion capture, filmed at a rented studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,^[40] though this was limited by technical constraints. The character movement was also treated as being cinematic, though limited polygons heavily inhibited this.^[43] Animating non-player characters entering and driving cars proved to be difficult for the team, due to the variety of vehicle designs. "It involved chaining together dozens of different animations and altering key frames in code", recalled software engineer Alan Campbell.^[31] The team used varying camera angles when animating the game's cutscenes in order to evoke different emotions.^[44] For the voice acting, the team wanted "natural, subtle performances", which proved difficult as many of the actors "had in their head the idea that because video games are animated, their performances needed to be animated", explained motion capture director Navid Khonsari.^[43]

Claude is unnamed in the game,^[45] and his name is not officially revealed until his appearance in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). He is a silent protagonist, never speaking throughout his appearances; the team decided upon this primarily because it "did not seem like a major issue", due to the other challenges faced during development, and also partly to allow players to identify with the character, as he would be who the players want him to be.^[13] The developers did not have "any one single inspiration" for Claude; they liked the idea of a "strong, silent killer, who would be juxtaposed with all of these neurotic and verbose mobsters".^[13]

Sound and radio design[edit]

Grand Theft Auto III features about three and a half hours of in-game radio material. For the music, the team sought a broad diversity to recreate the real sensation of skipping through radio stations, reflecting the gangster movie culture invoked by the game. The team used the talk radio stations to add character to the city and provide a "unique take on American life";^[46] Sam Houser described it as "a very iconoclastic look at America".^[41] The team used real DJs to portray those on the radio. In doing so, they wrote unusual dialogue for the DJs, seeking the effect of "high production values and absurd content". Music director Craig Conner assembled the assets of the radio station—music, advertisements, DJ dialogue, and station imaging.^[46]

Chatterbox FM, one of the game's radio stations, is entirely talk radio hosted by Lazlow Jones, who met Rockstar's managing director Terry Donovan in 2001 as they were both preparing to travel to Los Angeles for E3. Donovan invited Jones to Rockstar's offices in Manhattan, where he met the development team, including Dan and Sam Houser and producer Jamie King, and they invited him to work on the game. The writing sessions took place at Dan Houser's apartment, and the entire process, including editing and recording, took around four to five months. With the station's guests and callers, the writers wanted to satirise American lifestyles, focusing on fictional stories as opposed to quickly outdated stories based on recent news. Jones found the conversations to be natural, having worked in radio for several years. The roles of the guests and callers were performed by Jones's friends and neighbours, including his father, and were recorded in New York.^[47]

Cuts and changes[edit]

After the events of 9/11, the original colour scheme of the police cars in the game (top), which resembled that of the NYPD, was changed to a generic, black-and-white design common in the United States.

The game's original cover art was changed after 9/11,^[48] but still used for its European release.^[49]

[We] felt that a full content review of all our titles and the marketing materials we use to represent them was absolutely necessary for us ... we have come across certain small contextual references that we were no longer comfortable with, as well as a couple of very rare gameplay instances that no longer felt appropriate to us.

— Terry Donovan, Rockstar managing director, IGN, 19 September 2001^[50]

Prior to Grand Theft Auto III&