Retro Runback - Grand Theft Auto 3

Welcome to Retro Runback, a look back at games from, believe it or not, 25 years ago. I will be taking a look at these games and looking at the development, how they were made, how they came to be, replaying them in their original forms, and trying to decide if they are indeed classics and worth replaying today. I've played and shared my time with a few classics already, including Halo: Combat Evolved, Metal Gear Solid 2, Luigi's Mansion, and a few others. But now, this time, we are heading into one of likely the most influential games of at least the 21st century. That's right, it's time to go to Liberty City and play GTA 3. Work on this game began around 1999, just after GTA 2 and with the PlayStation 2 on the horizon. The earlier games had a pretty loyal following but for the most part modest sales, and the team at Rockstar and DMA Design saw that 3D hardware could be a chance to make a city feel more alive. Early prototypes reportedly showed that simply driving around a 3D world was possible, so it was time to push towards open-ended exploration. If you've ever played the top-down games before 3 was released, you notice that even though things are a little bit restricted in comparison, it still does feel pretty open and free-flowing. Like I said, DMA Design was behind this game, later to be renamed Rockstar North, based in Scotland. Dan Houser led the writing team who drew on massively popular crime films like Scarface, Goodfellas, and Heat. Influences you can see here in Grand Theft Auto 3 and definitely in the follow-up of Vice City. The development team licensed the RenderWare engine from Criterion. This was a powerhouse engine at the time that was able to bring players dozens of amazing games including Burnout, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4, Vice City, Max Payne 2, Midnight Club 3, and one of the most popular arcade racers out there of this generation, Burnout Paradise. Grand Theft Auto III was also pitched to the higher-ups at Xbox at the time before their console was released to be an exclusive, or at least a limited-time exclusive, for that debut machine, but they turned it down. It ended up being an exclusive for the PlayStation 2, but just imagine how that may have shaped the gaming landscape all these years later. In GTA III, Liberty City is split into 3 islands, helping the story and pacing and scope, and also aiding the technological work that it took to create this world, keeping it a little bit more manageable for the hardware. Traffic, pedestrians, police, and weather all had to kind of coexist within the PS2's tight limits, and making sure areas were separated was a necessity according to reports from the development team. GTA 3 lets players commit crimes, obviously. It's an open-world city. You can attack pedestrians, police. You're committing crimes constantly. That's just Classic GTA at this point. But it wasn't just the violence or the freedom of violence and chaos that had parent groups, commentators, and some politicians up in arms. The real kicker seemed to be that the player could take a prostitute to a quiet spot on the map, sit around for a few minutes watching the car bounce around, get a boost of health as a reward. The sex worker would then walk away when it was over. And while violence and objectification in games is not really anything new and wasn't actually at this point either. You can really only equate the uproar around this game to probably what happened with Mortal Kombat in its release on home consoles and arcades about a decade earlier.

Mortal Kombat, debuting in home video today, is expected to sell 2 million copies at $50 a pop. A horrifying possibility for parents who can't believe the game makers are fantasizing about decapitation and murder.

I don't think I'll have this at home, no. You don't think so? A little bit too violent.

You look a little startled.

Yeah, it's a little too violent, I think. That's pretty bad.

And that, that's just plain gross.

Yes, the game that literally led to the creation of the ESRB, the video game rating system. But all this was actually boosted and used as a marketing tactic by Rockstar and marketers, and well, it worked. GTA 3 was one of the best-selling games of the generation. It was top of the list in North America in 2001 despite coming out in October and racked up 6 million copies sold in just 12 months. The only game that sold more than it in 2002 was the sequel Vice City. There's a lot more to say here, and I'm gonna get to some of that in a moment, but I do actually want to talk about how the game plays today. I booted this up in 2 different ways this time. I started with a PS2 emulator, which is largely where this footage was recorded from. It was a little bit sluggish at times, and I thought, you know what, I kind of want to play on original hardware as much as I can, which I have been doing for the most part. through this series, so I picked it up on Xbox and played on the original Xbox this time around from start to finish. And straight up, this game is just great. It's a fun time going around Liberty City, tearing up the streets with wild scenarios, having next to no care in the world, and being a complete pawn in the mob game throughout the story. And while I know millions of people love the follow-up games like San Andreas and of course GTA 5, but I honestly prefer a silent main character here. It just kind of works for me. I don't want to be this guy. I'm not feeling like I am role-playing in a way, but I'd rather just watch and listen to the wacky mobsters around me than insert myself into the situation. Just my personal taste. That being said, the story here is just okay, and that's fine. It gets a little bit repetitive, but it works and gets you through crazy scenarios, and that's really what you want from a game like this. Gameplay-wise, I did find it to control mostly well. It's definitely a dated control scheme and one that for some reason I remember having a fully controllable camera, but that's not really the case. You can whip the camera around to lock on behind you, but the joystick doesn't give you control over it at all, which I for some reason thought was the case. It didn't always work in tighter quarters, but largely speaking, Liberty City in this version is pretty impressive, but it's pretty wide open and a little sparse, so it actually was totally fine. I mentioned this on a recent episode of my podcast Remember 64, but I was playing both this and Ocarina of Time, the original, concurrently and noticed just a couple of things that, you know, I might not have seen when I played these both 15 or 20 years ago. The open-worldness of both of these games is incredibly impressive for their time. Ocarina, even though it was years before, actually had a few more impressive uses of what an open world is. Like going into buildings and talking to pretty much everybody you can. Those are minor points here, and GTA 3 still does probably more with its open-worldness and scope outside, but I did notice those small things. Both games are actually a lot more sparse and less populated than I remember. I really did have a great time playing GTA 3, and I drove around this map largely remembering most of it for some strange reason. And like I was then, I was also hooked on the music stations and the talk radio stations. Lazlo, for some reason, just works for me. Uh, this type of comedy is just right up my alley. I liked this stuff so much at the time in the early 2000s that I found a way— I don't know, probably Napster, LimeWire, or something like that at the time— and got MP3 versions of all of these radio stations and burned them on a CD to listen to at my own Leisure. That's right everyone, I was that cool. The game also looks pretty good and plays pretty well. It shows its age but it holds up for sure. The violence is also very tame compared to what we've seen since though in a small way I can understand why this particular title was the one that people latched onto. No matter any of my small qualms with the playthrough, I was having a blast with GTA 3 no matter what was going on. There's no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most influential video games of all time and made the biggest step we've ever seen in terms of what creating a real breathing city could be. Grand Theft Auto 3 redefined, or maybe even defined, what an open world game can and would become. At the time, there were dozens of reviews and previews and lots of coverage and deep dives into what this game is, what it became, in a lot of magazines. So I thought I'd head over to the Video Game History Foundation, who has a fantastic breakdown and library of old magazines like GamePro, Nintendo Power, and Game Informer. I looked at a couple of those this time around. I started with GamePro issue 157, October of 2001. Here we have a preview of GTA 3 where they are taking a look at their hands-on with the PS2 version of it. They say things like, the entire city was animated with moving traffic consisting of all sorts of vehicles and changes to the time of day and weather. Best of all, the streets were populated by citizens who possessed an unavoidable New York attitude. And then I headed over to Game Informer issue 104 from December of 2001, and here is when reviews started popping up quite a bit across the board. For GTA III, they dubbed this Rockstar's Reservoir Dogs, and quote, although many will make comparisons with Driver, GTA III shatters the standards set by its predecessors. With a 9.5 overall score, some of their bottom-line notes read as follows. For graphics, pop-up problems aside, it's pretty amazing considering the size of the environments. Playability. The driving engine is great, but the combat is somewhat clunky.

Wait here, man, while I go in and talk to Luigi.

Well, that'll do it for this edition of Retro Runback. Make sure to check us out on consolecreatures.com for all your latest news and reviews of big games, indie games, and everything in between. You can check out the Creature Cast where we talk about all of those things on a weekly podcast, PlayStation Generation, which talks about all things PlayStation and PlayStation news, and my retro game podcast that focuses on the N64 called Remember 64. We'll catch you next time on Retro Runback, and if you're about to play GTA 6, have a great time. With my girl.