Welcome to Liberty City. Where it all began. The critically acclaimed blockbuster Grand Theft Auto III brings to life the dark and seedy underworld of Liberty City. With a massive and diverse open world, a wild cast of characters from every walk of life, and the freedom to explore at will, Grand Theft Auto III puts the dark, intriguing, and ruthless world of crime at your fingertips. With stellar voice acting, a darkly comic storyline, a stunning soundtrack, and revolutionary open-world gameplay, Grand Theft Auto III is the game that defined the open-world genre for a generation.
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Rockstar wanted GTA III to be about driving and shooting, full stop, so the only plane in the game was intentionally hobbled. It barely gets off the ground and handles like a brick, because letting players properly fly around wasn't part of the plan.
Dig into the game's files and the Dodo is classed as a car, not a plane, which explains why it shrugs off crashes like a road vehicle and can even use a handbrake. It's the only aircraft in the whole series with brakes for that exact reason.
Early concept art for 8-Ball labels him as 'Mullan' rather than the name that ended up in the finished game. That name never resurfaced in any later GTA title, so it's just a little fossil from development.
There was genuinely a Dreamcast port in the works at one point, but as the console's fortunes tanked Rockstar shelved it. Because of that, GTA2 remains the only mainline entry ever to reach a Sega system.
Those streaky 'trail' effects you get when sprinting or driving fast made their series debut here, well before it became standard across later entries.
GTA III hit shelves on the exact same release date as the PlayStation 2 port of GTA2, two years after the original came out. Odd bit of scheduling that meant old and new GTA were sitting on shelves side by side.
Some official cheat code books actually printed a code that was supposed to let you urinate on walls. Type it in and, as far as anyone's found, absolutely nothing happens. It just never worked.
Liberty City wasn't always going for gritty realism. Early in development the characters moved in a much more exaggerated, childish way and the whole colour palette was way too bright for a gangster story, before the team pulled it back to the tone we ended up getting.
For years fans insisted the September 11 attacks forced a big last-minute overhaul of GTA III before its October 2001 release. Rockstar has consistently said that's overblown and no major gameplay changes actually happened as a result.
Giving Claude a voice would've meant motion-capturing dialogue at a scale that just wasn't practical back in 2001, so Rockstar kept him mute early on to save themselves the headache. It wasn't until Vice City came around that a talking protagonist was even considered.
