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Dan Houser has an interesting story to tell about Grand Theft Auto III and the time the industry did not get it.
Dan was asked in the recent IGN interview if there was a point where Rockstar thought they had something special with the game. He said this:
Well, it’s funny being back in this hall because we used to do E3 here. And I think we thought we had something uh very exciting around the end of, you know, March 2001.
And we came to E3 in May of 2001 and the rest of the world did not seem to agree with us. They seemed completely underwhelmed by something we thought had the potential to be amazing.
And then it was supposed to come out in September and got delayed because of 911. It came out, I think, mid-October 2001? And I think some of the press still didn’t quite get it but the audience did. Yeah.
How Were Video Games Different In 2001?
Some older gamers may not properly recognize the passage of time from the last two decades. But Grand Theft Auto III, alongside Final Fantasy VII, was a watershed game that changed the trajectory of the video game industry as a whole.
Fans will remember the game launched on the PlayStation 2. And there are even fewer fans who remembered it also did come to the original Xbox alongside Windows. But Rockstar North was making this game before the launch of the PlayStation 2.
This was when the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Saturn were the major platforms of the day. Rockstar North didn’t even have that name yet; it was known as DMA Design.
At this time, arcades were still a major part of the industry. A lot of the most popular console games were ports of arcade games, mostly fighting games.
Developers were learning to make 3D games. This meant scaling up not just in terms of graphics and budgets. Game design had to evolve to meet the needs of this new world.
What Grand Theft Auto III Brought To The Table
Nintendo did not invent 3D video games on their own. But the solutions they came up with for Super Mario 63 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time stuck as the ways that games interacted with a 3D world.
DMA Design then defined how to make a 3D open world video game. This was unheard of in the arcades, but PC and console gaming hadn’t seen something like it before either.
We don’t know why the industry didn’t understand that Grand Theft Auto III was special in 2001. But the industry would jump on the trend DMA started and figure out what made open world games tick after it proved its success.
That’s the story of so many other historically significant games, like Halo, Doom, Pac-Man, Diablo, etc.
