Grand Theft Auto III Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/4/2023)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Grand Theft Auto III

Developer: DMA Design

Publisher: Rockstar

Genre(s): Open-World

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC

Release Date: October 22, 2001

Since the dawn of humanity, our society has always needed a scapegoat as a source of blame for the corruption of our young. Television on the whole was claimed to rot the minds of children since its inception in the mid-20th century, and the rebellious spirit of rock-and-roll soon after proved to be another nightmare for the halcyon post-war America that we desperately attempted to uphold. However, these ridiculous moral panics were but historical footnotes of the early information age by the time I was born, so I obviously didn’t experience them firsthand. However, the video games I played as a child were always a point of concern for my general welfare as an impressionable youth. Even then, I still wasn’t privy to the genesis point of the video game controversy when hundreds of soccer moms fainted at Little Timmy performing button combinations to unsheathe one’s spinal cord from their bodies in Mortal Kombat. No, my initial exposure to the anti-video game pandemonium was early in the sixth generation of gaming in the early 2000s when this little game hit the shelves: Grand Theft Auto III. Not since sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll has a three-word combination struck fear in the hearts of the perennially bored housewives and prudish, geriatric politicians of America. Considering how vocal the outcry was against this game, it seemed as if these authoritative figures would rather their children be influenced to become a degenerate hedonists rather than mirror the realm of murder and chaos found in Grand Theft Auto. Ever since the media conveniently discovered that the Columbine shooters were fans of games like Doom and Quake, attributing the exposure of video game violence to the foibles of adolescence became second nature to the stodgy older generations. Releasing Grand Theft Auto III two years later felt as if an encore of that horrific event was directly on the horizon. My own mother grounded me for two weeks in the fourth grade for watching a friend of mine drive around in this game for five minutes before school one day, as if simply being exposed to the game for such a short time would affect my ethical fiber like radiation poisoning. (I swear, that’s all I watched him do). The Grand Theft Auto epidemic was an irritating reality for gamers such as me, but I’m sure the then-small-fry game developer Rockstar Studios were eternally grateful for all of the inadvertent press.

But everyone would be remiss if they didn’t experience Grand Theft Auto III back then, for the franchise's third entry during the PS2’s infancy was a groundbreaking milestone in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto III’s titanic splash didn’t just provoke the wrath of parents and politicians: it ignited a revolutionary new wave of game design by popularizing the open-world genre and indelibly laying out the rules and regulations for all other developers to follow. Realistic polygons were only a surface-level aspect of the transition to the third dimension in the former generation that started it. After the initial period of setting the foundation, game developers were seriously expanding the possibilities of a 3D environment to radical proportions. The non-linear sandbox design popularized in the levels of fellow 3D trendsetter Super Mario 64 was enlarged to proportions that they could be reminiscent of environments from the real world, eliminating the problem of empty, ethereal graphical space found in the levels of the game from the previous generation. In fact, GTA III coalesced its areas so seamlessly that using the term levels out of the beginner’s book of the gaming lexicon now seemed inappropriate to assign. A staggering evolution in game design was taking place, and GTA III's contributions to this growth and change served as the substance behind the game’s bloodshed and mayhem. However, one would have had to experience GTA III in the short window of time of its initial release to appreciate what it did. Not only did the series sprout two sequels on the PS2 soon after that eclipsed its impact, but hundreds of imitators naturally emerged after seeing the tangibility of its content and design that translated to great success. In a way, GTA III is the Super Mario 64 of the sixth generation of gaming: an early innovator that skates by in retrospect because of its influence despite its myriad of glaring flaws.

A portion of GTA III’s appeal can be attributed to its cinematic flair. The franchise's influences stem directly from tons of crime fiction from other entertainment mediums, ranging from HBO’s television staple The Sopranos, heist films such as Heat and Reservoir Dogs, to the acclaimed filmography of Martin Scorsese. GTA III’s opening cutscene displays a bank robbery unfolding, with three culprits making their quick getaway. The female criminal at the scene of the crime, Catalina, leaves her boyfriend and fellow bank job accomplice Claude to die by shooting him point-blank while escaping the scene. Claude miraculously survives, but is the sole perpetrator apprehended and taken to justice. After being sentenced to ten years in prison, the Colombian Cartel seizes the armored van he’s being transported in, and the hostage takeover gives him and another prisoner “8 Ball” an opportune moment to escape custody. While the cinematic splendor on display here doesn’t rival the arthouse ambitions of, say, Hideo Kojima, the exhilaration of the bank robbery to introduce the game is an effective enough hook to intrigue the player immediately and set a precedent for the game’s chaotic tone.

Claude Speed, a name that is totally on his birth certificate and not the fabricated persona of a criminal/D-list porn star, is GTA III’s protagonist and the vehicle for the player committing a bloody holocaust in the city streets. Interestingly enough, Claude is another example of a silent protagonist seen so many times in a game that presents its story cinematically. Rockstar would learn their lesson soon after but here on GTA’s open-world debut, interacting with anything and anyone with a character that doesn’t make a peep feels completely unnatural. The silent protagonist trope should be reserved for platforming characters who only focus on tight gameplay and customizable avatars in RPGs. Through a particular perspective, Claude maybe works as a silent protagonist to immerse the player in the biblical chaos they can commit without any injected personability getting in the way. This was the developer's intention, right? No, they severely fucked this up.

The core of GTA III’s heightened non-linearity is to facilitate a sense of freedom, to unbound the shackles of video game discipline and order, allowing the player to run wild and let their hair down, or so to speak. One realization that dons over the player is that once Claude arrives at his safe house is that the rate of gameplay doesn’t halt when the player isn’t engaging in tasks that the game assigns them. The brilliance of GTA III’s design philosophy is that the player could potentially spend hours playing the game without even progressing the story with one mission, and it’s also likely that the player wouldn’t grow weary of their deregulated merriment. Playing a game with rules on the playground as a kid is all fine and dandy, but the free reign of using everything at your disposal on the slightest impulse tends to feel more joyous, no? The player is given the opportunity to perform acts of the game’s namesake and ride their stolen property around with a sense of recklessness like they’re in The Italian Job. Claude can engage in spontaneous fisticuffs with the unassuming pedestrians that roam the streets, or take the morbid route of ending their insignificant lives with the blast of his roulette of firearms. As one can expect, all this debauchery will alert the attention of the Liberty City Police Force, who will proceed to hunt you down like a pack of wild dogs. The alert level coincides with how tenacious their efforts will be in ousting your malignant presence from the streets, escalating to them sicing an attack helicopter and an army-grade tank on you if you refuse to comply. One may argue that the police penalty is a buzzkill to the adrenaline-fueled fun that the game fosters, but where would the thrill of committing crimes be without the looming consequence of legal blowback? Then again, the player is never forced to enact anything that would warrant this heavy rate of firepower unless they choose to.

Whether or not the player wishes to lay waste to Liberty City on their own time, I implore the player to at least frolic around to learn the layout of the game’s map. The most egregious aspect of GTA III’s rudimentary open-world design is the lack of a map. I don’t care if the game exemplifies the fetal stage of the open-world genre: no amount of reflective hindsight excuses omitting this essential feature from the game. The circular radar located in the bottom left corner of the screen only indicates the safe house and mission icons, but not the locations of the Pay-N-Spray garages or the Ammu-Nation stores. The reason why both of these stores are as imperative to find is that if Claude gets arrested or gunned down, he respawns outside of either a hospital or the police station with only the clothes on his back. The cause for both of these unfortunate outcomes is usually attributed to the police horde raining their fury down upon Claude or being unequipped to deal with the various gang factions infecting Liberty City. Not to mention, the player will constantly be subject to lethal carbeques because every vehicle in the game is as durable as paper mache. Eluding the police by changing the color of the car and stacking one’s arsenal to rival the gangbangers is the only possible way to survive the harsh streets of Liberty City, and obscuring these destinations from view on the radar makes the game unnecessarily more irritating. All the player has as a reference to where anything could be is a northern mark like a compass, but who do I look like? Magellan?

Learning the layout of GTA III’s map is an especially grueling escapade because the urban jungle the player is forced to commit to memory is rather drab. Liberty City is obviously a fictional American city because it doesn’t share a name with one from the real world. However, its similarities with The Big Apple almost veer into the uncanny valley. Like real-world New York City, Liberty City is divided into three islands that act as distinct Burroughs that the player has access to as the story progresses. One may argue that imposing barriers between the Burroughs negates a true open-world environment, but each individual island can stand on its own merits with its breadth. The starting island of Portland vaguely resembles both the New York Burroughs of Brooklyn and Queens due to its hilly elevation and the persistent presence of the metro station. Staunton Island is a comparatively more flashy, bourgeois metropolitan area like Manhattan. Shoreside Island ostensibly depicts the suburban sprawl of Newark, New Jersey. While the three islands are certainly inspired, they all lack a kind of urban pomp. Unique geographical features such as Portland’s Chinatown district, Staunton’s central park, and Shoreside’s dam give them enough distinction, but none of these sites pop and sparkle with that city magic. Many of these features feel slapdashed onto the map, obligations of what usually composes the city streets of America without any of the grand allure that makes spots like these enticing in real life. Around all these underwhelming “landmarks” are the typical tall buildings and cluttered streets that simply trace the bare minimum of urbanity. If New York was as generic as it is depicted here, I highly doubt it would be the most populated city in the country.

Eventually, the player’s pension for senseless, unmitigated destruction will conflict with the fact that crime costs money. Maximizing the scope of a mindless murdering spree requires at least a fair amount of cash to purchase weapons, and the arcade-style method of ebbing away vehicles to the point of exploding and gaining a sum of money isn’t enough to finance all of the manic fun the player could be having. Naturally, the only way of earning a substantial income in GTA III is by putting Claude to work. Claude could steal a taxi and siphon the fare money from the poor Indian guy he’s co-opting the business from but really, the more organic way of earning income in the game is completing the story missions. Essentially, GTA III’s story missions are odd jobs assigned by Liberty City’s finest: the higher-ups of the city’s crime syndicate. Claude becomes everyone’s glorified errand boy in his mission to get to Catalina, maintaining his pure chaotic neutral position between the Italian mafia, the Yakuza, and the Jamaican Yardies strictly for his own benefit. These tasks range from escort missions via car, assassinations, property damage, etc. By completing these various missions, the player will be more than compensated for their troubles so they can make bigger bloodbaths on the streets.

Being that these jobs are assigned by the disgusting criminal toe scum beneath the feet of the city, almost every mission given to Claude is dangerous, deplorable, and highly illegal. Because of this thrilling combination of circumstances, GTA III’s missions tend to be quite challenging. The tasks are relatively short and straightforward, but the game goes the extra mile to grief the player with additional circumstances. If you’re too afraid to cause any sizable conflict on the streets for fear of facing the lashing of the law, get used to it. A pattern anyone who plays the game will notice is that the harder missions involve Liberty City’s boys in blue strong-arming Claude with everything they’ve got while the mission is still underway. Some notably bothersome moments involving the police abruptly exercising their authority during missions are running over a man in a seemingly impervious body cast in “Plaster Blaster” or bumping a car over and over to drop paraphernalia in “Evidence Dash.” The only way to elude the rampaging police force is to visit a Pay-N-Spray to throw off your scent, which is why obscuring their view on the map is cruel and unusual. Actually, I’ll kindly accept any vehicular mission over any that involve weapon combat with gang members. Getting up close and personal with a posse of armed malcontents in missions like “Arms Shortage” and “Grand Theft Aero” assures that their barrage of whizzing bullets will tear through Claude like tissue paper. Preparing beforehand by acquiring body armor will only make a marginal difference in defense, for its material is evidently made of bubble wrap and the targeting system for the guns is not exactly smooth or accurate. The sniper rifle is your best friend in this game and not only during the often maligned “Bomb Da Base: Act II” mission. Time is of the essence when committing a criminal offense, so many of the missions are given a strict time limit to complete. I’m convinced the developers meticulously formulated the perfect time to keep the player on edge during these missions and scrape out of that time by the skin of their teeth. Even if you outsmart the constraints of the city-spanning mission “Espresso 2 Go!,” you’ll still only ram into all nine espresso stands across Liberty City with under a minute left. The Asuka mission acronym “S.A.M.” is arguably the most frustrating mission in the game because it combines every excruciating element listed above. To top everything off, the missions in GTA III must be completed without any mistakes, for there are no checkpoints to bail the player out when they make a mistake or die. GTA III is a ruthless test of trial and error, and whether or not the game offers a fair, reasonable challenge is up to contention.

Performing the missions and furthering the story is also the only way to meet GTA III’s number of supporting characters. GTA III cast exemplifies the film noir tenet in that there are no good, moral characters to attach to and hope for their happiness and prosperity: only bad characters that fall on a spectrum of amoral behavior. The problem with every character in GTA III is not their scumbaggery, but that they’re all caricatures. The Leone crime family seems like a parody of every Italian mob ever depicted with their ritzy attire, restaurant place of operation, and overbearing mother figure yelling at a made man from a distance. Kenji is the classic Yakuza member, justifying the ultraviolence he commits with ancient Japanese spiritualism. At least it’s amusing and disturbing how aroused his sister Asuka becomes around Clyde the more death and destruction he causes. These characters might only seem as one-dimensional as they are because their relationship with Claude never surpasses a formal employer-client dynamic. I’m sure corrupt cop Ray and sleazy yuppie Donald Love lead interesting lives, but it’s difficult to peer into their characters in a deeper manner when it's all strictly business.

The business of all of these criminal figures at least begins to wrap around to something interesting around the second half of the game. After Claude’s relationship with the Italians is soured due to the Don’s wife Maria and her philandering, Claude enters the center of a drug trafficking ring involving all of the gang factions, shoveling SPANK around the city and attempting to occupy control. Things get rather contentious between the Colombians and the Yakuza when Claude whacks Kenji using a cartel car to set them up and take the blame. This escalated gang war only allows Claude to get closer to Catalina, which he eventually does at the cost of her murdering a scorned, grieving Asuka. The final mission involves following Catalina’s helicopter to a cartel base. Fitting for a final mission of a challenging game, the caveat to the climax of Claude’s revenge plot must be done without any purchased weapons or ammunition, as Claude must rely on cartel pickups. Why not just make Claude also do this mission stark naked while they’re at it? Catalina finally earns her comeuppance via a bazooka shell, but GTA III’s ending is not happy. A part of the mission was to rescue a captured Maria, who Claude decides to shoot as the screen goes black. Jesus, Rockstar. Maria was a trifling skank, but that’s just ice cold. Ike treated Tina with more dignity than that.

I could easily write off GTA III for being completely undercooked in every feasible department. The world is empty and bland, the controls are austere, and every mission is padded with unfair bullshit. All of the characters have the charisma of a gaggle of cockroaches, including the protagonist we’re intended to root for. However, I’ve come to a realization that maybe most of these discrepancies were intentional. It’s possible that all of GTA III’s attributes ranging from its world to its characters seem raw and generic because of the bluntness the developers want to convey. Through the game’s fabric, a sort of satire is subtly interwoven through the game’s active ethos. Perhaps the reason why Liberty City is an unflinching depiction of New York City without the superficial glitz and glamor associated with a bustling American metropolis. Claude as a silent protagonist isn’t a mistake made by sticking to traditional video game tropes despite the cinematic evolution of the medium, but only a stoic, unwavering sociopath could survive on the brutal city streets run by people who have no human warmth. The harsh ending indicates there are no happy endings here, only the next step in a cycle of violence and greed. It’s a bit of a stretch in divulging some sort of substance, and I don’t think any concerned parent would care in making their decision to keep it away from their children. Overall, GTA III’s substance is defined by its innovations, which were certainly awe-striking at the time. No other game tested a gamer’s subconscious ID that thirsted for animalistic impulses, nor was there one that facilitated it. GTA III belongs in a museum where we can give it all the respect it deserves but from an impersonal distance.