For a long time, I kept looking at the games piling up in my Steam library. Every time, I told myself I would get through that backlog someday. Well, that day finally came. With GTA VI coming soon, it felt like the right time to go back to the series’ roots. I wasn’t particularly interested in playing the remake, and the original version had been sitting in my library for years.
I first discovered the series through San Andreas when I was at school. But I missed GTA III and Vice City. Well, technically, I played them at internet cafés. I just never followed the story. Instead, I drove around the city and messed around with cheats.
I have no real interest in playing through the first two games, so I found myself downloading GTA III.
I had always thought of GTA III as the game where Rockstar’s GTA really began. For some reason, I imagined the history was pretty simple: DMA Design made the first two games, and BMG Interactive published them. Then Rockstar came along, took over the series, and that’s how we got GTA III.
The real story turned out to be much more interesting. Rockstar had actually published GTA 2 as well. Brothers Sam and Dan Houser, who would later help found Rockstar, were involved with GTA before the company even existed. Sam worked at BMG Interactive and was involved in the game on the publishing side. Dan joined BMG while GTA was still in development.
So Rockstar didn’t appear out of nowhere and only took over GTA with the third game. The people who would later shape the whole series had been around almost from the beginning.
But that raises another question. If the Housers were involved in GTA before the third game, why did GTA III change the series so much? It wasn’t simply a case of Rockstar suddenly coming to DMA Design and showing the developers what GTA’s atmosphere should be like.
Even within DMA Design, moving to 3D wasn’t an obvious choice. After GTA 2, the studio was effectively working on two possible directions for the series. The original team was developing GTA 2.5, which kept the familiar camera perspective, while another group was experimenting with a fully 3D city. That second idea caught Sam Houser’s attention, as he had wanted to see GTA in 3D for a long time.
Perhaps this is the turning point that makes GTA III feel so much like the beginning of Rockstar’s GTA. Not because Rockstar had nothing to do with the series before, but because the third game started to bring together the approach people would associate with GTA for years to come.
A large, open city where you can take a break from the story and do your own thing. A crime story, player freedom, radio stations, satire, and an effort to make the city itself an important part of the experience. Some of these things had existed before, but GTA III brought them together into the formula that Vice City, San Andreas, and later games would build on.
Still, understanding why GTA III was so important to the series is one thing. Properly playing through it for the first time, twenty-five years after its release, is another.
The game gets off to a strong start. First, the main character is betrayed during a robbery. Then he is put in a prison van with other prisoners. On the way, the convoy is attacked, the bridge is blown up, and our silent hero gets a chance to escape with another prisoner. A few minutes later, you already have a car and are heading into the city.
This is where GTA III quickly shows why it made such an impact at the time. Almost immediately, you’re let loose in an open city and can do whatever you want. You can head straight to a mission, or take a turn along the way, steal another car, get into a shootout with the police, or simply drive around earning money as a taxi driver.
The early missions aren’t difficult. You get fairly simple jobs: drive someone somewhere, steal a car, kill a specific target, or pick something up. It might seem basic at first, but the game gradually starts combining these tasks. The overall structure, however, stays the same: watch a cutscene, drive to a location, do something or get involved in a chase, and finish the mission.
And it all works well. But there are a few problems. Some missions are easier if you already know what to expect: which weapons to bring, where enemies will attack from, or what you should prepare for. The game doesn’t always give you this information in advance, so you only learn some things after failing.
Finding the right car is another problem. Some missions require a specific vehicle, but the game doesn’t always tell you where to find it. Sometimes, technical issues get in the way too.
In one mission, I needed a car belonging to a rival gang. I remembered seeing them near a construction site, so I headed straight there. But no cars were appearing on the streets at all. I spent ages driving around the area, hoping they would eventually spawn. Most likely, this had more to do with running GTA III on a modern PC than with the game itself. Later, I found out that the gang’s cars had been parked inside the construction site the whole time.
That was when I started thinking that the game wants you to become a real resident of the city, rather than just a visitor. It shows you a couple of times where to buy weapons and repair your car, while some other places are left for you to discover. After that, you have to find your own way to those places. They don’t even appear on the minimap.
This makes you pay more attention to the city itself. You start remembering where everything is. And once certain gangs become hostile, you get a rough idea of where you’re likely to run into trouble. Sometimes, quite a lot of trouble.
There are three islands in the game. You unlock the second and third as you progress through the story. As I mentioned, you gradually get used to each new area. But that wasn’t really the case with the third island.
On the first two islands, there are enough missions to take you to almost every part of the map. The third island, however, only opens up near the end. It has just a few story missions and a bunch of side missions. It gave me the impression that, by that point, it was time to put all their effort into Vice City. Perhaps they felt they had taken GTA III as far as they could, while Vice City would let them build on everything they had already created.
Maybe if I had spent more time simply living in GTA III’s world, instead of working through the story and side missions, the final mission wouldn’t have sent me back to driving a taxi. You need $500,000 to start it. I had finished all the side missions on the third island. I also tried the police and ambulance missions, as well as some races. But in the end, I went back to taxi work to earn the remaining $100,000. After forty fares, I finally had enough money to start the final mission.
As for the story, all I can really say is that it exists. Yes, it’s rough, but at least it gives the main character a reason to move from one island to the next. None of the characters get much development, though. The protagonist never speaks and treats every crazy request as an order. If someone tells him to frame a person or kill someone he was on good terms with, he just does it.
The missions themselves were often more interesting than the story connecting them. One might involve a boat chase, another might ask you to blow up a plane, and another might have you rescue a criminal from the police. Although the basic actions stay much the same, the game changes the situations often enough to stop the missions from becoming repetitive. So I quickly stopped paying much attention to the dull story. I didn’t really care about the characters, but I wanted to see what kind of trouble the game would send me into next. That variety was enough to keep me playing.
I also enjoyed taking in the city’s atmosphere. All three islands feel different. Each has its own mix of people and cars, and you gradually unlock new weapons. Speaking of weapons, they can behave rather strangely too. Take the M16 assault rifle, for example. It’s a great weapon: very accurate and powerful, even at fairly long range. But the moment you aim it, it starts shaking all over the place.
Overall, I’d say I enjoyed the game, although I don’t plan to play through it again. If you missed it when you were younger, I don’t think it will be as enjoyable today as it might be for someone who has that sense of nostalgia. Still, if you want to see how the series developed, it’s interesting as a museum exhibit you can actually interact with. Maybe I’ll try the remaster someday, but that will be another story.
