Rockstar Couldn’t Afford Motion Capture When They Made Grand Theft Auto III

Dan Houser shared an interesting story about the making of Grand Theft Auto III – and how Rockstar got their start on 3D gaming.

Dan was interviewed by IGN senior executive editor Ryan McAffrey. Ryan was actually asking him about something else when he got into this tangent.

Here’s Dan’s story:

When I started work on GTA 3, the team already had laid out a story and I made a few adjustments. But really we were figuring out quite fundamental building blocks of how we do storytelling on an open world game.

You know, we we’d heard other people were doing motion capture cutscenes. So we thought, that sounds fun.

We had no money, so we bought it by the second. We found a studio in Long Island that could do it by the second.

They could only do three people at once. We didn’t think we had enough bandwidth to figure out how to make the main character speak.

So, it was very, you know, put together with bits of string. I think Alex Horton, who was the uh main animator on that, did an amazing job assembling that stuff, really making it up as we went along.

What You Didn’t Know (Or Remember) About Grand Theft Auto III

Most gamers got into the franchise with Grand Theft Auto III on the PlayStation 2. It’s the start of the franchise as we know it today.

This is like how Street Fighter II, and not the original Street Fighter, is the proper start of the fighting game genre as we know it today.

The first two Grand Theft Auto games on the PlayStation were considerably less ambitious. In fact, they had a top-down perspective and used pre-rendered graphics to make a pseudo-3D effect on a 2D game.

They paled in comparison to another PlayStation game, Driver: You Are The Wheelman. This game’s levels were full cities you could explore freely as an open world.

Rockstar Wasn’t Perfect From The Start

Truly, Grand Theft Auto would not be the blockbuster franchise it is today if Rockstar wasn’t able to pull off what it did with Grand Theft Auto III. It seems that even they were surprised by the level of innovation they were able to pull off on the PlayStation 2. And they brought those ideas along to the PC and Xbox, as they evolved through the years.

For those who are curious, Alex Horton worked with Rockstar from 2002 to 2008. He started off with their motion capture department and became an art director. Today, he runs his own creative design studio, Horton Designworks.