So here we are. Liberty City. The defining open world experience of the early 2000s. The sandbox everybody wanted to play in. A game so popular that I've even played it in a hairdresser. In fact, I may also have first played it in that hairdressers, all those years ago. Whether I did or not, I have spent hundreds of hours inside Grand Theft Auto III, but not for a long time. Not since it and the PlayStation 2 was taking the world by storm.
Claude Speed, the silent protagonist, finds himself acting as a dirty-job handyman for hire by all the criminal groups of America. Want something stolen? Destroyed? Dealt with? Claude's your man. Across three entire islands inspired by New York, you'll be running, driving, crashing, killing, shooting, smuggling, ferrying, collecting, racing, chasing, and Lord knows what else in an attempt to... make some money? Overthrow organised crime? What's the plot of GTA III? It's been so long I can't remember.
But, armed with fan-made patches and tweaks, I'm more than ready to find out.
Fun Times
Betrayed on the job, you're shot by your girlfriend and left for the cops to deal with. It's only through good fortune that you're transported across the city with a bomb expert and a criminal gang leader, who has organised an elaborate escape plan that culminates in blowing up a major bridge in the town. And thus, you are welcomed into GTA III.
The character models are certainly showing their age these days, with potatoes and bananas for hands, but already you can see that developers wanted that cinematic presentation, in stark contrast to previous GTA titles. Oh, yeah, if you hadn't noticed by now, this isn't a top-down pixel graphics affair with dodgy voice work here and there, but a fully 3D open world with some top talent providing gangster voices aplenty.
I'm playing the PC port, but there has been enough dislike of it and enough love for the PlayStation 2 original that modders have ended up making the PC release act more like the console version, to the point of fixing various effects and even skyboxes in an attempt to have the GTA III that they know and love. As such, while I don't actually know of all the differences, I'm perhaps playing this game at its absolute best, with full controller support that I decided not to use, and fixed ultra widescreen support. Anything else is an added bonus - I just wanna play.
And what a city we've got to play around in. It's infamously split into three distinct islands, with the gritty Portland being our first port of call, before opening up into the city of Staunton Island and the heights of Shoreside Vale.
I have memories of them all, having completed the PS2 original as a teenager, and as I'm playing it again, little areas come back to the front of my mind, my mental map returning in patches. And it has to - the only in-game map you have access to is the minimap, and it's not ideal.
This mission tasks us with stealing a car, planting a bomb on it, then returning it to kill its owner with no repercussions. I don't know of the exact place names, but the mission is so familiar to me that I'm able to link all the essential parts together.
The story so far is nothing monumental. Odd jobs for this Italian or that one, take person A to place B, destroy objective C, come back later for more. Gangs doing gang stuff against each other is the gist of it. Everyone wants control, and not of a tiny corner, but of everything.
It all takes place in a living world. Car thieves and muggers attack people on the street (you included), gang members protect their territory with all manner of guns, and patrol in their own distinct vehicles. The cops roam the streets, keeping an eye on you and your behaviour. If it leads to injury or fire, ambulances and fire trucks hurtle around the corner to deal with the problem.
Frustrations
But GTA III isn't all sunshine and roses - not in this day and age. The series has always been known for its funny physics models and character quirks, but here, more than anywhere, they're all on show. You'll mostly get around the city by car, and seemingly every single vehicle is made of paper. Crash them only a couple of times and they'll explode. Turn them over and they'll explode. Clip a curb, or take a corner too fast, you'll roll, flip, maybe get some stunt money, then explode.
It will all happen during missions, as the world around you reacts to it all. Crash a car while chasing another, and now you've got to find a new one, steal it, avoid the cops, find the vehicle you were trailing in the first place and carry on pushing it off the road before your second vehicle explodes as well.
If you fail a mission, you're left where you are to begin again. That means collecting weapons, health, armour, maybe another car, and getting back to the mission marker to trigger it again. If you fail on a mission by dying, you're dumped at a hospital. If you fail one due to the cops arresting you, you're dropped outside the Police HQ, with no weapons and a loss of money.
If you're smart, or you cheat to give yourself a bunch of weapons, like I did, then missions can be solved with your brain as well as your skill. Destroying vans with grenades is not going to happen. Destroying vans with a rocket launcher is going to happen, and is much more manageable. If you don't cheat, you can even work out ways to solve missions in unexpected ways, say, stopping someone escaping in a car by rigging their car with bombs before the mission. The freedom you have to complete an objective is pretty lenient.
It's also recommended for a lot of missions. This game was developed in the long, long ago, where a design that made sense in one way made no sense in another. Missions can result in instant death unless you actively cheese out results in your favour by sniping gangsters from a distance before approaching a mission, for example.
This mission required me to drive a car to the crusher and crush it, only there's a body in the back, and some folks want it back. Or revenge for its death. I don't even know if he's dead back there. Probably is. Anyway, after getting with ten feet of the crusher before flipping and exploding, I thought I'd eliminate the guys following me before the mission, giving me a more relaxed ride.
The first attempt resulted in me accidentally blowing up the target car as well, and the second and third attempts resulted in several failures along the route thanks to those wonky car physics.
"Never fear! I can just try a different mission." So I did. I've got the freedom to do what I want, so why not try something else instead of beating my head against the desk?
Oh, cool. An ambush. I'm glad I gave myself all the weapons before going into this mission - and even then it didn't help. After a few failures in a row, I closed GTA III.
Further Fun Times
The fact of the matter is that games have come such a long way since GTA III that it's better left in our memory, than in our hands. Of course, saying that I couldn't help but hop back in, steal that Banshee, and hunt down some stunt jumps.
Ahh, memories...
Final Word
One day, I'll return to Staunton Island. I was really hoping it'd be today, but even with cheats, Grand Theft Auto III is a product of its time and takes a bit of time to get used to all over again. The modded adjustments make it so enticing to return to Liberty City that I can't just abandon it. My goal was to just explore the place all over again - with a modded free camera to take all the touristy photos I wanted - because that's what GTA III is to me these days: something to enjoy through exploration.
The missions are all varied and span the scales from simple delivery missions to timed shenanigans that'll frustrate until you finish them, and they're probably the most enjoyable missions in the GTA series as a whole, because of how many different ways you can complete them.
The characters look like cartoons, but you ignore that and pretend they're all mob bosses and crime families with real problems. We're not at the height of storytelling, but it's an admiral effort that takes you across the criminal underworld.
Having such a reactive world really cements the idea of Liberty City being a real place. Radio stations, tailored to all kinds of musical tastes, have news bulletins that mention your exploits at certain times of the story. Stealing a car can literally lead you to discover a new genre of music, and many tracks on my various playlists outside of GTA III come from the series' radio stations. Everyone had their favourite, and I'm still discovering those that I missed out on because I was determined to only listen to Chatterbox.
Grand Theft Auto III is ambitious and far from perfect. To play it again requires going in with the knowledge that it won't be an easy time, and won't be quite like you remember it. Persist, and you can have - or make - a lot of fun, as millions and millions of players can attest to.
Do I really need to say whether you should play this or not? Who hasn't? You haven't? Ok, you should play it. The rest of you should if it interests you, but might just want to watch and reminisce otherwise.
Fun Facts
There's only one fact about GTA III, according to every video review I've seen over the years: The cover art was changed to the now iconic collection of characters in boxes because of the 9/11 Attacks just a few weeks before release - the original box art (still appearing on the EU cover) was deemed 'too raw' for American audiences.
Grand Theft Auto III, developed by DMA Design, first released in 2001.
Versions played: PlayStation 2, 2001, via teenage memories.
PC, 2002.