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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Fly a Dodo far enough north past Shoreside Vale and your radar starts showing place names for towns that don't physically exist anywhere in the game. Turns out those names are all references to real Rockstar staff who worked on the title.
There's a wall in a Bedford Point alleyway you're not meant to reach without glitching over it or using a Dodo, and if you do get there, a sign is waiting to call you out for it directly.
Somewhere in Liberty City there's a billboard cheekily reading 'See you in Miami!' It's a straightforward tease for Vice City, dropped in well before anyone outside Rockstar knew where the next game was headed.
GTA III originally had a character called Darkel who'd hand you missions built around blowing up buildings with bombs. He got dropped before launch, likely for being a bit too close to real-world terrorism given the timing, but he's still listed in the manual with his voice actor credited and his model is sitting untouched in the game's files.
Horace Walsh, better known on air as 'the Pacifist,' spends his K-JAH broadcasts begging Liberty City to put the guns down and lay off the SPANK. His backstory actually stretches back to Liberty City Stories, where his cousin Natalie was running the station before he eventually took her spot.
Game FM wasn't voiced by actors doing a bit, it was hosted by actual New York DJs Stretch Armstrong and Lord Sear playing versions of themselves, banter and all. It gave the station a completely different feel from the rest of Liberty City's more parody-heavy radio lineup.
Steve Watson, the New York DJ known as Lord Sear who co-hosted Game FM back in 2001, died in March 2026 at 53. For a lot of players his voice was inseparable from cruising round Liberty City, since Game FM leaned into genuine East Coast underground hip-hop rather than the parody stations elsewhere on the dial.
None of the nine stations shuffle their playlists. Every song, ad break and DJ line plays in the exact same order every single time you tune in, which is part of why long-time players can still recite the ad breaks from memory.
Tommy's room at the Ocean View Hotel has a poster on the wall featuring Claude, the silent protagonist from GTA III, even though Claude himself didn't actually have a name yet at this point in the series and wouldn't be seen in Vice City itself since the story is set fifteen years earlier. A small tip of the hat from one game to the one that came after it.
Vice City wasn't originally meant to be its own game at all. After porting GTA III to PC, Rockstar started kicking around the idea of a mission pack that would bolt some new weapons, vehicles and missions onto Liberty City. The concept just kept growing until it made more sense as a standalone release, and that's how we ended up with an entirely new city instead of a glorified expansion pack.
