Retrospective: GTA III

Hitting prostitutes with baseball bats, mowing down innocent civilians, flying over the city and observing your wanton destruction. Ahh, those heady days of youth. The Grand Theft Auto series always has been, and always will be, an unapologetically controversial beast.

While people, arguably rightly, have concerns with the morality of the games, it cannot be denied that GTA is both critically and commercially, one of the greatest franchises in the history of video games. But while GTA V breaks records and wows fans left, right and centre, I want to look back to the game that revitalised and reimagined the GTA series and made it the enormous behemoth it is today.

 The Grand Theft Auto series always has been, and always will be, an unapologetically controversial beast

It seems incredible that it has been 12 years since the release of Grand Theft Auto III, the first game in the series to utilise a 3D game engine and the iteration that planted the seeds for subsequent successes with Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV and V. The widespread acclaim the game received took GTA from a low-key success story to a sphere of mainstream dominance. Even now, GTA III is regarded as one of the best games to grace the PS2 and video games magazine even claimed that “the game’s open-ended gameplay elements have revolutionized the way all video games are made.”

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While now, it would be easy to look back to San Andreas and more recently, Los Santos, a variation of San Andreas, as the pinnacle of the GTA cityscape, it was GTA III’s Liberty City that set the benchmark for open world sandbox gaming. While the city may lack the personality of later games, it became a home for creativity and freedom.

The location is coupled with a typically stellar cast of characters, a fun and evocative soundtrack, complete with numerous radio stations to browse and effectively, limitless possibilities for mayhem. The choice to complete missions at your own free will, a indepth set of side missions away from the main storyline; these are things we take for granted in the modern era of the sandbox game, but many of the features we now see regularly owe a great deal to Rockstar’s first major hit: Grand Theft Auto III.