Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 action-adventure game developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games. It is the first 3D game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Set in Liberty City, loosely based on New York City, the game follows Claude, a silent protagonist who becomes entangled in a world of crime, drugs, gang warfare, and corruption while pursuing revenge against his ex-girlfriend. The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. Its open world design lets the player freely roam Liberty City, which consists of three islands.
The core 23-person team at DMA Design, based in Edinburgh, worked closely with Rockstar Games 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 (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. The player completes 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 the player to wait for further instructions or events. Outside of missions, the player 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.
The player may run, jump, or use vehicles to navigate the game world. In combat, auto-aim can be used as assistance against enemies. Should the player 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 the player respawns at the nearest hospital, at the expense of losing armour, weapons, and an amount of money.
If the player commits crimes, 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 the player become very aggressive. Law enforcement officers will search for the player as they leave the wanted vicinity. The wanted meter enters a cooldown mode and eventually recedes when the player is hidden from the officers' line of sight.
The player controls the mute criminal Claude. Throughout the story, Claude meets various characters from the criminal underworld. As the player completes missions for different gangs and criminal organisations, fellow gang members will often defend them, while rival gang members will recognise them and shoot on sight. While free roaming the world, the player 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 them to bribe police after committing a crime, reducing the wanted level by one star per bribe.
The player 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 three-dimensional environment allows a first-person view while aiming with the sniper rifle, rocket launcher and the M16 rifle. In addition, combat was reworked to allow the player to commit drive-by shootings by facing sideways in a vehicle. The player is given 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 (voiced by Cynthia Farrell) during a bank heist in Liberty City. Claude survives, but is arrested and convicted; en route to prison, his transport is attacked by members of the Colombian Cartel, who abduct another prisoner. Claude escapes with a fellow convict, explosives expert 8-Ball (Guru), who introduces him to the Leone Mafia family. Claude begins working for the Mafia, running various errands and eventually helping them win a gang war against the local Triads, which earns 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, which he accomplishes with 8-Ball's help.
Salvatore later instructs Claude to dispose of a car, but his trophy wife Maria (Debi Mazar), 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, leading Salvatore to rig the car with explosives. Claude escapes to Staunton Island with Maria and her friend Asuka Kasen (Lianna Pai), 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 (Robert Loggia), whom he eventually helps flee the city, and influential businessman Donald Love (Kyle MacLachlan), who hires him to rescue the convict abducted by the Cartel earlier. Love later sends Claude to kill Asuka's brother Kenji (Les J.N. Mau) under the guise of a Cartel attack to start a gang war between the Yakuza and the Cartel, which will lower real estate prices.
While retrieving a package from the Cartel on Love's behalf, Claude encounters Catalina, now the leader of the Cartel, at a construction site; she escapes after betraying and shooting her partner, Miguel (Al Espinosa). Asuka, blaming the Cartel for Kenji's death, seizes the construction site and captures the wounded Miguel, torturing him for information on Cartel operations. After Claude sabotages the Cartel's SPANK distribution network, Catalina kills Asuka and Miguel in retaliation and kidnaps Maria, demanding $500,000 for her release. During this time, Claude continues to work for Love, until he, the convict, and the package all mysteriously disappear. After raising the ransom money, Claude meets with Catalina to rescue Maria, but Catalina double-crosses him and flees with the money, leaving Claude trapped within the Cartel's stronghold. He escapes, frees Maria, and shoots down Catalina's getaway helicopter, killing her. As Claude and Maria leave the scene, Maria begins to complain about the kidnapping before her rant is abruptly 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 (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 Harvests (1998) 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 (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 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 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.
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 the 3D element allowed the "chemistry of the team [to come] together perfectly for the first time".