3D Era 2001 Liberty City
Liberty City, USA. The Worst Place in America. Grand Theft Auto III is the first fully three-dimensional entry in the series, built by DMA Design on Criterion's RenderWare engine and published by Rockstar Games in October 2001. It follows Claude, a silent criminal left for dead by his girlfriend Catalina after a bank robbery, as he works his way up through the Leone mafia, the Yakuza, a bent detective and a media mogul across the three islands of Liberty City. The city streams continuously off DVD with no loading between districts, and missions are picked up from marked givers rather than fed in a fixed order. It sold over 14 million copies and holds a 97 on Metacritic, tying Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 as the highest-rated PlayStation 2 game.
339 entries
Pan, zoom and jump to any district.
Named cast, who they answer to, and how their story ends.
The story in the order the game gives it to you.
Every car, bike, boat and plane, with the top speed, acceleration, braking and grip the game actually runs on.
Damage, clip size, range and accuracy for every weapon, down to the decimal.
Crews, syndicates and the cops who tax them.
Every station on the dial with its full tracklist.
Every district on the map, with its size and borders.
The background population — cops, gangbangers, tourists and everyone else on the street.
Safehouses, garages and the businesses that pay you back.
Every code, per platform. Some permanently lock 100% completion.
// Chapter
01
31 missions
Claude and Catalina rob the Bank of Liberty with the Colombian Miguel driving. Outside, Catalina tells Claude she is an ambitious girl who no longer needs him, shoots him, and leaves with the money. Claude survives, is arrested, and is being driven across the Callahan Bridge when the Cartel blows the span to snatch a prisoner known only as the Oriental Gentleman. Claude escapes into Portland with a fellow convict, the bomb-maker 8-Ball, who walks him into Luigi's Sex Club 7 and a job driving girls. Portland is the old industrial island: docks, warehouses, the Red Light District, and a Leone family whose grip is being tested by the Triads. Claude works up the ladder from Luigi to Joey Leone's garage, to the caporegime Toni Cipriani and a war on Chinatown, and finally to Don Salvatore Leone himself. Salvatore has him kill the informant Curly Bob and, with 8-Ball, blow up the Cartel's SPANK freighter in Portland Harbor. Then Salvatore, convinced by Maria's lie that she is sleeping with Claude, rigs a car to kill him.
14 firsts for the series
Liberty City · $1,000,000 + a new weapon/item pickup at all three safehouses every 10 packages (Pistol → Rocket Launcher)
Liberty City · $1,000,000 bonus
Liberty City · $1,050,000 across all 20
playstation 2, north america
render pipeline
producer
10 stations
across the map
requirement groups
PlayStation 2 · Windows · Xbox
The game was due on October 3, 2001. Rockstar's head office was close to the World Trade Center, and Dan Houser has said he came near to cancelling the release outright. It slipped three weeks while the team combed the files. Rockstar's own estimate is that the changes amounted to about one percent of the game.
The Police car and Enforcer lost a livery that resembled early-2000s NYPD vehicles, replaced with a black-and-white scheme closer to Californian patrol cars. The parked Airtrain at Francis International was made non-solid so it could not be rocketed. Aircraft flight paths over the city were altered, one mission referencing terrorism was cut, and some radio and pedestrian dialogue was removed.
The original artwork was replaced for North America by the now-standard collage layout, panels of individual character art around a centred wordmark, which every mainline game has used since. Europe, Australia and New Zealand shipped with the original artwork.
The protagonist is never named on screen or in dialogue. The name Claude was not confirmed until he appeared as an antagonist in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The team kept him silent partly because, with everything else the project demanded, it did not seem like a major issue, and partly to set a strong, silent killer against a cast of neurotic and verbose mobsters.
A revolutionary vagrant named Darkel, voiced by Bill Fiore, was to hand out rampage-style missions aimed at wrecking the city's economy. He was dropped during development. His exploding ice cream van job survives in the retail game as I Scream, You Scream, reassigned to El Burro.
Hospital bills and Pay 'n' Spray both cost $1,000 here and $100 from Vice City onward. Hidden Packages pay $1,000 each instead of $100. The economy was scaled down for every subsequent 3D Universe title.
Rockstar originally pitched the game to Microsoft Game Studios as an Xbox exclusive; Microsoft declined, citing the adult content and the weak sales of its predecessors. The original 3D prototype had been built on Dreamcast around the end of GTA 2's development, and a Dreamcast port was in progress before the console's decline killed it.
The series' first talk-radio station came out of writing sessions at Dan Houser's apartment with Lazlow Jones, who Rockstar met through Terry Donovan in 2001. Writing, recording and editing took four to five months, and the callers were played by Jones' friends, neighbours and his own father. The brief was to satirise American life rather than chase news stories, so the material would not date.
Double Clef FM opens on Mozart's Non piu andrai farfallone amoroso from The Marriage of Figaro, composed in 1786. Nothing older has appeared on a Grand Theft Auto radio station since. At the other end of the dial, Flashback 95.6 is nothing but Giorgio Moroder's 1983 Scarface soundtrack.
Grand Theft Auto III holds a 97 on Metacritic, tying Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for the highest-rated PS2 title on the site, and 95 percent on GameRankings. It sold more than 14 million copies.
