Like me, Perry was wary of misrepresenting the truth just to make a point. It unshackled games, at least from a 3-D perspective.”ĭouglass Perry, who was the editor-in-chief of IGN’s PlayStation websites at the time, agrees-to an extent.
“I came into work the next day, and I told my company that this was a game-changer. At the time, he was working at Ritual Entertainment, a small video game company based in Dallas that was responsible for shooters like SiN and Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. “I remember firing it up at home, and I was just stunned,” he said. But he did buy everything new, and so he picked up GTA III at launch despite some hesitation. Stockman, who was in his 20s in 2001, had no great love for the first two Grand Theft Auto games-“terrible,” he called them. To confirm that my memories weren’t just accelerated nostalgia for an era when my concerns started and ended with “can I finish homework in time to play video games,” I dialed up video game developer Chris Stockman-best known as the design director on the original Saints Row-and asked him how he recalled GTA III’s release. But I am aware of the way that everything is magnified at that age, when your accumulated life experiences fit into a brochure.
GRAND THEFT AUTO III INITIAL RELEASE DATE TV
Unless you stole the tank, too.Īs a tween, all of this felt like the most unbelievable, incredible thing-an event worth crowding around the TV at my friend’s for, and hoping his brother would let me hold the controller for just a few minutes. You could steal a police car and lead the cops on a wild and violent chase through that city, escalating the chaos until the military showed up with tanks and most likely put your joyriding crime spree to an end. You could play through the main story, about a lifelong criminal eking his way up the hierarchy of organized crime, or you could just roam for hours, unpacking every tucked-away secret inside this surprisingly detailed city. Only none of this was window dressing, or walled off by the same invisible barriers preventing true movement in most video games we’d played-you could go here, you could go there, you could hop into a car and drive off the street onto the sidewalks, before launching yourself off a ramp and hurtling through the air and crashing into another car. But kids today-to date myself by earnestly writing “kids today”-can’t exactly know what it was like to boot up a PlayStation 2 and drop into a three-dimensional world that looked just like ours, populated with skyscrapers and taxi cabs and passersby ambling down the street. Not to make it sound like the moon landing. My buddy Tully’s older brother Ian is hanging out with his own buddies, and while no one here is outwardly contemptuous, the kid brother’s snot-nosed friends merit no attention as history unfurls before us. My buddy Steve and I have walked over to our buddy Tully’s house, where we’re going to sit with our buddy Tully’s older brother Ian in their parents’ living room, congregated around their boulder-sized television. Thus it’s with some mild surprise that within two seconds of thinking about it I located a firm memory of the first time I played Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III, a game that rewired my-and possibly your-conception of what video games could look and play like, which is perhaps why I shouldn’t be so surprised to remember the moment even though I haven’t thought about it in 20 years. Time passes, memory fades, the accumulative effects of alcohol, marijuana, and Twitter conspire to pull a fast one on your brain, and so on, and so forth-the stuff great novels, and occasionally great movies, are made of. Not a whole lot more than that, I’m afraid. Ī smattering of memories from 2001, the year I turned 13: the death of my paternal grandmother, following several years of declining health the Italian exchange student who emailed me a computer virus, following several weeks of uneasy cohabitation at my parents’ apartment the high-level online Pokémon tournament I was forced to quit because of my duties hosting that exchange student 9/11, of course.
Twenty years later, we’re taking a look at its legacy while we wait for the upcoming GTA trilogy remaster, prepare to purchase yet another version of GTA V, and read rumors about the still-unannounced GTA VI. GTA III became a bestselling sensation that defined the open-world genre, spawning several sequels, inspiring countless imitators, and causing a cultural uproar. On October 22, 2001, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto III, a game that transported the publisher’s trademark criminal mayhem to an unimaginably immersive 3-D Liberty City.
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