Part of the enjoyment of trying to evaluate some of the most important games of all time involves the revisitation of a specific time and place when recalling those games, either in our memories or through actual, physical play.
In one of our earlier entries, we touched on “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” a definitive gaming masterpiece for the original PlayStation that exceeded its own worth as a game by also being a cultural touchstone.
The late 90s were alternative AF, and Tony Hawk was basically the perfect game at the perfect time, becoming more popular, and ergo, more important, as a piece of our pop culture in the process.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call “Grand Theft Auto III” a similar phenomenon, capturing a gritty, depressed, and even violent moment in our nation’s history with a game that suited much of our population’s sensibilities.
By any measure, 2001 was wild, man.
To set the scene, stocks were tumbling from the highs they had enjoyed at the height of the “dot-com” surge in the late 90s, wherein for a while there it seemed like every entrepreneur within sniffing distance of the Internet was trying to sell some website of some kind, often for dollars on the penny (is that an expression?).
That bubble, as of 2001, was bursting, and perhaps not coincidentally with economic times being tough, the crime rate was going up for the first time in a decade.
In general, musical tastes were trending super commercial, away from the soulful melodies typified by the grunge scene and the overarching environment of creativity we enjoyed in the 1990s, becoming instead an overly polished pop machine bearing fruit the likes of a flood of boy bands, Britney Spears, and so forth. This is oversimplifying things by quite a bit, but a hyper-produced (soulless?) sound had unmistakably taken over the top of the charts. The big exception, of course, was the upcoming rush of emo music, which was replacing “soulless” with “sad.”
In theaters, “darker” films were the rage, with even more popular fare like “The Matrix,” “X-Men,” and “The Lord of the Rings” trending darker than what was common with the more brightly adorned offerings of the 90s. More artistic fare included such “uplifting” films as “Mulholland Drive,” “Vanilla Sky,” and “Blow.”
So, you had economic uncertainty, violent crime rising, sometimes soulless but more often moody themes dominating entertainment, and then … 9/11 happened.
Yeah, that too.
I think everyone who lived through 9/11 was personally affected by it to some degree, whether you or someone you knew physically went through the tragedy or not. There was a nationwide trauma that occurred.
Weirdly enough for me, I was supposed to be at the first day of a new job I had taken out of desperation in an attempt to kickstart my life. Post-graduation, I had gotten a couple of nibbles in my job searches, but I was finding that most of my relevant experience interning in various communications capacities in and around my college campus didn’t make me a hot hiring prospect at the various advertising agencies around the state/country/world.
Shocker.
That had led me to do some soul searching in trying to figure out what I really wanted to do, and how to go about getting it.
You see, advertising was always a compromise choice, a thing that seemed practical but still allowed me to work in a creative field. It was a “please your parents” decision for someone who had previously dabbled in art. Ultimately, though, it didn’t light a fire under my ass. My failed job search was a reflection of that.
I wasn’t willing to go to the mat for grabbing a spot in the industry, since I just didn’t feel that strongly about it.
What sparked that passion for me, eventually, was sports journalism (go here for a little background on where that passion took me).
The only problem with sports writing?
I had even less experience with that.
So I decided for myself I’d go volunteer at the local sports information office and get as much practical experience as I possibly could there (the idea being, at some point, someone would pay me for those services). In the meantime, I would work a garbage telemarketing gig during the day to pay the bills (and to show off my work ethic to prospective employers).
Yes, I secured my spot in hell with the decision to become a telemarketer, but hey, we’ve all gotta get paid.
9/11 was my first day of that shitty telemarketing job.
They sent us all home.
Which was more than fine with me, because holy hell, I couldn’t even begin to imagine trying to work through that. Let alone calling people to try to sell them something they didn’t need whilst they processed that unimaginable tragedy.
“Yes, people are dying right now, but have you considered your business not getting the reach it could be? THAT’S the real tragedy, my friend!”
Thankfully, we didn’t do that.
Instead, I watched everything unfold on television with my parents.
The breadth of emotions covered on that day is difficult to describe to anyone who didn’t live through it.
Shock, fear, grief, and anger are a good starting point, but I think one of the biggest things going through my head that day, as I think back on it, was defiance.
An unrequited yearning to help in some way, a helplessness at not knowing how to do so, and a hope that heroes would continue to emerge (and that our government would do the right thing) were surely central to the experience through the first several hours, but eventually I remember settling into a mindset of “I’m going to live my life and no one is going to be able to stop me.”
I wasn’t going to live in fear.
The day was like 15 straight hours of consuming CNN and the network news reporting, soaking in every detail, every story, every development, until finally, mercifully, by the end of the day, as a kind of catharsis, I recall watching an elderly gentleman covered in ash recount his day. At the end of the interview, after talking about all the crazy shit he’d seen and lived, he raised his arm in the air, Judd Nelson-style, and declared, “But I’m still here!”
That guy got it.
He embodied the reaction to the tragedy that I wanted to embrace. Moreover, with my newfound direction in life in regards to a career path, I was properly motivated to get to work.
This mindset and determination sustained me through literal years of internships, volunteerism, and part-time work that finally allowed me to break through with a full-time sports producing job with CBS in 2005.
But before all that, there was a lonely desperation at play in that fall of 2001, and in the wake of tragedy, when America was at its absolute angriest, THAT is when “Grand Theft Auto III” hit store shelves.
Naturally, it was a gigantic, absurdly successful hit.
Grand Theft Auto III at a glance:
Genre: Open-world action adventure
Released: 2001
Platform: PlayStation 2
GamePro’s most important game of all time
The history behind the creation of the game is both complex and simple. As the title implies, it was the third game in a series that had already established itself by the turn of the century, revolving around stealing cars from people, yet it had never made the jump to 3D.
Grand Theft Auto III was the series’ debut in a third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective.
That is all fairly straightforward and well known, methinks. The complexity within this situation had to do with the intellectual property being shuttled around among three entities: developer DMA Design, publisher Rockstar Games, and Take-Two Interactive, the folks who were doing the actual purchasing of various companies and assets and shifting them all around. DMA and Rockstar would eventually be merged with one another, so for the purposes of this article, we can pretty much just refer to the makers of the game as being Rockstar, since that’s their moniker now (even though originally other parties were involved).
Anyhow, back to the 3D shift, because it’s important. It had a lot to do with why the game was stupidly successful.
To wit, while we can safely presume the violent content of the game was a big reason it was like catnip for an angry group of expectant gamers in the fall of 2001, we can also surmise that its shift to 3D made the concept more appealing than it originally had been.
Nearly 15 million copies of this game have now been sold over its lifespan, with its direct sequels boasting even more impressive sales figures. The shift to 3D was the single biggest change for GTA3 from its predecessors.
And you just don’t sell that many copies if you don’t tap into making the thing fun as hell to play, either.
Similar to other franchises like Zelda and Metal Gear, Grand Theft Auto was seemingly always made for this change in perspective, receiving a notable elevation in its transition from 2D to 3D. The game became more immersive and more exploratory in nature, also giving rise to more urgency when things would (almost inevitably) go south.
The game at its most conventional featured a story mode, wherein achieving certain tasks for certain individuals would unlock more story and more missions, which would continue on and on until you reached the end of the game. These tasks were often illegal in nature, involving you doing things for crime bosses and so forth, even though a lot of it was actually fairly benign.
“Drive over there. Once you’ve driven over there, now drive to this other place. Okay, good. Now, I’m going to need you to drive to yet another place.”
These sections of the game were clearly inspired by other 3D “driving mission” games like “Driver” and “Crazy Taxi,” and they work fairly well on their own.
But where the game truly comes to life is as an open-world sandbox, where you basically just goof off and do whatever you want to do and ignore (or at least postpone) the missions as much as you want.
There’s an implied permission to act poorly here, where the game’s design allows the gamer to do things like get into violent shootouts with the police, carjack people, engage in sexual intercourse with prostitutes, run over pedestrians with your car, and basically just terrorize your environment in whatever way you see fit.
Moreover, these acts are presented in as entertaining a way as possible, often coming across as amusing or thrilling, so the incentive to engage with things in a negative way is very much present. There’s also little downside in doing so, since death basically just respawns you in front of a hospital (you magically got better!), and even if you die, you can load your previous save file and reset the stage.
Essentially, there are no consequences.
The lone exception here might be the game’s “wanted” meter, which tracks the vile acts you engage in consecutively over a specific period of time and gives you stars for each reprehensible thing you do. As this meter fills up with more and more stars, the police become much more aggressive about trying to apprehend you. If they take you in, you respawn in front of a jail cell instead of the hospital (you magically were released!).
But even these encounters with the police can be desirable. If you can get the authorities to call in the national guard by firing rockets at police helicopters, for example, a tank will enter the cityscape, and true to the game’s title and intent, you can even steal that tank.
Safe garages are strewn about the city, and if you can get whatever vehicle you’ve stolen into one, it’s now yours – it saves the game and resets your wanted meter. You’ve gotten away with whatever you’d previously done.
And it’s the same thing with weaponry, wherein whatever you take into these save points, you carry forward with you in the rest of the game.
Hello, rocket launcher!
So, whether you want to collect an armada of sports cars, armed military vehicles, or anything in between, you have the ability to do so. If you want to become your own personal stunt driver, and practice making insane jumps with your vehicle, with no real threat of death present, you could do that. And if you wanted to just tussle with other residents of the city, you had that option as well.
This is why these kinds of games became known as being open-world “sandboxes,” because you are literally just out there playing and doing whatever you want.
The game’s physics are notoriously funky nowadays, and we can also acknowledge that graphics have come a long way since this game debuted, but where I will abide no hatred is with the game’s soundtrack, which was innovative as hell and also whips all the ass.
Driving around Liberty City, you have the option of changing the soundtrack as you wish, essentially “changing the radio station,” which is such a dang cool idea and ends up being immersive as heck.
Certain stations are talk radio inspired, with people gabbing over inane silliness. Others are music-focused, including the one that drops “Push it to the Limit” from Scarface on you, which, let’s be honest, is inspired and incredible and can’t help but make a person smile goofily in response.
There’s nothing quite like running over a group of pedestrians with your Porsche as you “go past the point of no return.”
But honestly though, how did they make all of this dubious stuff so much fun to do?
Well, one of the problems inherent in video game design is predictability, wherein executing an action correctly can either result in predictable, pleasing rewards, or in unpredictable, oftentimes displeasing outcomes.
The former is the core reason behind why most people play video games in the first place. People like to be rewarded for executing the same thing over and over again with rewards that are seen as being equitable or fair. Think of pulling off Ryu’s dragon punch in “Street Fighter II” – you need a measure of skill to make it happen, but once you see its effectiveness at flattening your opponent, you want to do it again and again.
It needs to be both effective and repeatable.
The latter option, unpredictability, is the more realistic outcome, because people are by their very nature unpredictable. But that can often be less “fun” for gamers, when they get denied that desired dopamine surge. An example here is of finding a difficult-to-reach treasure chest in “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” and opening it to discover something lame like a rusty sword.
“Shouldn’t I have been rewarded for the effort of having climbed a dang mountain and murdering an entire band of moblins?”
Appropriately, Rockstar landed on the idea that carjacking someone should be fairly simple to do, be repeatable, and provide consistent reward.
That is not real life.
Not even a little bit.
And at a super basic level, even if they can’t articulate it, I think most people understand that.
“The video game about carjacking people and murdering police officers is fun because I can get away with it.”
“Doing this in real-life would end up with me dead or in prison.”
And there you go. There’s a level of wish fulfillment going on here for gamers, and as they are encouraged to do things here they can’t do in real life, they get to engage with some stuff that’s just not their personal jam and never will be.
It’s why people watch movies about gangsters or World War II or whatever. It’s not stuff you do in real life. But you get to be transported for awhile, and depending on your perspective, that can be pretty cool.
And I’ll say this: With this permission to act poorly, I’d rather see people engage with it in video games than in trolling people anonymously online. Or in choosing to vote a particular way because they want to “own” someone else. These are actions people have been given more leeway to engage in of late, with less public judgement, and yet, these actions aren’t pretend. They have consequences.
Better to act the fool in gaming rather than doing so in a way that actually harms people.
So what makes it worth playing today?
I know that there are arguments in favor of other games in the GTA series over this one, but certainly none were quite so impactful as this one was. People can favor certain gameplay improvements or stylistic choices that came along later on … but those games didn’t reinvent the series, let alone a whole dang industry, in the same way this one did.
If you want to better understand gaming history, or simply pick one Grand Theft Auto game to engage with as a starting point for the series, I think the call is a pretty easy one to make.
More interesting to me is the debate over whether one would want to play any Grand Theft Auto game at all.
That one’s a little more complicated.
Putting aside any ethical questions for a moment, I personally have difficulty recommending the series from a pure enjoyment standpoint.
Actual cultural relevance absolutely supercedes my own views on the matter (as it should – this game is hugely important to the industry and also as a “time capsule” for a bygone era), but should I give a full-throated recommendation for a thing that at least in part led me to hang my controller up for about a decade? A game that provided a great deal of entertainment in real time, but also eventually bored me, so much so that I got disinterested in video games in general?
Making matters worse, the game was so popular it inspired a fleet of copycats and clones, and those games being everywhere … also bored me.
That’s a significant strike, if we’re being honest.
“Hey, eat this shit sandwich that will put you off eating forever.”*
* Since we’re having fun with analogies here, let’s go ahead and talk about the contents of said sandwich. It would not be a literal shit sandwich, because I can acknowledge upfront that I enjoyed the sandwich at first, and also that lots of other people enjoy the sandwich too. This sandwich, then, would almost certainly contain an overwhelming amount of truffle oil and perhaps some liver pate. Maybe some pineapple too, so that I can have an allergic reaction to it. That combination might just put me off eating forever.
Other games have led to boredom and frustration, but I’m not overstating it to suggest that is a pretty severe reaction, methinks.*
* In the interest of fairness and clarity, let me also admit that no, I don’t think that GTA alone temporarily ended my passion for gaming. Moreover, I made my way all the way through GTA3 in relatively short order and it was actually GTA: Vice City, its sequel, that left me feeling like I’d rather eat a truffle oil sandwich. But to write it completely accurately, the brand, as a whole, even if not solely responsible for my disinterest, certainly contributed to it. And the cracks, such as they are, started showing up for me with GTA3.
This type of game, I have discovered, is really just not my type of game.
And now it’s super popular.
Because of this game, specifically.
Grand.
But gosh, even with all of that taken into consideration, and even if that knocks the game down my countdown several spots (which it did), Grand Theft Auto III STILL lands in the “you’ve gotta play this” pile, because it’s just so dang influential, and absolutely, admittedly, fun.
Beyond having fun playing, it remains an important snapshot of that particular time, and it is an exceedingly memorable experience.
Few other games will open your eyes like this one.
Which takes us back to the ethical question, and well, I think where I come down on that ultimately is the way I do with adult-themed movies or television. Can we trust adults to be adults and to handle their business? I’d like to believe so, even in spite of overwhelming evidence that we, as a society, really can’t do that. (The kids, as they say, are not alright.)
I say people (of a certain age) should have the option to play this game, so as to decide for themselves.
Would you like some wish fulfillment in the form of running over pedestrians and shooting rockets at police helicopters, or are you good with stuff that comes in a different package altogether? Give this one a spin and you’ll figure it out (you might even be surprised at the answer).
Now, I’ve got kids, and I’m not signing off on them playing GTA for a while longer yet. But the principle, as applied to other adults here, still rings rather true. As a parent, I have to put my faith in my kids to become decent adults themselves. Sure, they’ll make mistakes, but they’ll learn, and they’ll grow, and if we’re all lucky, they won’t rob any liquor stores.
I tend to think of the adults in our world in the same terms. Most people you talk to on the street are relatively sane, well-meaning people. Maybe they’re ill-informed on certain topics, or maybe they’ve got some growing to do, but I’m alright with them having a fairly harmless release point like GTA.
Because at some deep, fundamental level, we have to show some faith in one another.
And I prefer people acting irresponsibly in a game to them doing it in real life.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (PlayStation 2, Windows)
- “Grand Theft Auto: Double Pack” (PlayStation 2, Xbox)
- “Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy” (PlayStation 2, Windows, Mac OS X, and PlayStation 4)
- iOS and Android
- PlayStation 3 (PS Network)
- “Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition” (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Android, and iOS)