Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 405: Grand Theft Auto III

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

This Week in Retro host Diamond Feit carjacks the main mic from Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey this week to steer the crew into a wild and possibly illegal look back at the first truly pivotal game of the 21st century: Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto III. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, Buzz Buzz, Gimmie-Yo! Greetings programs. My name is Diamond Fight, and this is Retronauts. Today we're doing episode 405, and the topic is Grand Theft Auto 3. That's right, the third Grand Theft Auto game.

Not really, but, you know, close enough. And I am here with, well, who is here with me today? Why don't we start in the Carolina North? Oh, that's me, Jeremy Parrish. And, wow, you know the episode number and everything. You're making me look really bad. And over in California, A, near San Andreas. Hey, everybody, it's the currently abandoned Australia, Bob Mackie.

How's it going? Tough break, Bob. I heard it's a beautiful country. Yeah, I think all Americans are banned in most countries at the moment. So I don't think Bob should take it personally. It's hard enough to go to Canada these days. I wouldn't test Australia. But yes, the topic, we are talking about Grand The Auto 3 because this game is almost 20 years old.

Oh, my goodness. And it's a big deal. So I feel like, well, I feel like we as a collective feel like this is a very important video game and it's high time we talked about it. So we are here to discuss it. Some basic facts first. It was released, in fact, on October 22nd, 2001 for the PlayStation 2 in the United States. It was later released on Windows the following May, May 21st. It's a pretty big gap there.

I think they would keep that gap there for a while, sort of, I don't know if it's console exclusivity or just because they had to work on the PSPC versions. It would come out in 2003, September 2003 in Japan, published by Capcom, amazingly enough. Then it was later that fall was Xbox, so it did come to Xbox eventually. In 2010, it came to the Mac, November 12, 2010, and for the 10th anniversary, which is now 10 years old, it came out for mobile phones. iOS and Android, you can still play them on your mobile phones, I think. I haven't booted mine up in a while, but I definitely bought that one. I wouldn't try it.

Yeah. I personally would not try that. It's a bunch of on-screen keys here. Yeah, I remember when that mobile port came out, and I think I saw it at a Comic-Con, like a New York Comic-com. and I was deeply offended by its existence. It's not good. It's, um, I mean, no, it's the game. It's fine, but just the, the, the Kluji controls were terrible.

But I do like the fact that it took nine years for the Macintosh port to come out, because that's, that's very, like, historically accurate. That's, that's extremely on point. That might actually have taken longer than Doom. Doom the game that famously came out on Mac after its sequel. That's how bad Mac ports were. But was it out on a toaster before it was? out on Mac. That's the real question. Probably. Well, no toasters are running Grand Theft Auto 3 that

I know of. So let's get around here. So let's talk about Grand The Auto 3 and us, because we are the most important people on this podcast. What is everyone's personal history? What's everyone's personal history with Grand The Auto 3? And very much, please tell me if anyone here has played Grand Theft Auto 1 or 2, because I certainly have not. Well, I can go first, I guess. There were a few kids in my high school who liked Grand Theft Theta 1 and 2 and frankly I think we all thought they were crazy because they would just go on and on

about all the things you could do in the game and then when I would rent the game I would think yes you can do all these things but it's very hard to do and it's very very ugly at the same time so I wasn't getting a lot out of it and then Grand Theft Vought of 3 came out and I don't remember if magazines

had reviews for it before release it feels like they didn't because my experience was it was all very much word of mouth where it came out and I was like oh they made another one of those well I'll never play it it was America's Pokemon definitely yeah and then like um I forget maybe like a week or two past and then it was you know people were talking about it was becoming controversial message board threads were starting up about it and then I was in like a funco land and the manager there or one of the clerks there said hey guys this is getting banned in Australia if you want to buy this game you

should buy it now so I fell for a sales pitch and I played the hell out of it and I never finished it. I didn't finish just Wonder Vice City because they were too punishingly hard, but I did play a lot of it, often like communally with friends, just to see how much damage we could do in one sitting. But I was there probably like early November of 2001. This game helped me heal. Yeah, wow. So it sounds like your philosophy of playing this game was exactly the opposite of mine. Yeah, so Grand Theft Auto was one of those series

that I was aware of, you know, when GTA 1, 2 and London, 1969, or whatever, came out, you know, I saw them at the stores and looked at the back of the boxes and saw magazine reviews and they were generally pretty positive, but it just didn't look appealing at all. And so when GTA 3 came out, I paid no attention to it whatsoever. And that's, you know, that puts me kind of in the same category as most people. I know the U.S. press really didn't have a lot of interest in it, and something that I know James Milkey takes some pride in is that when he was at Electronic Gaming Monthly, he was really one of the first people in the press to say, whoa, you've actually got something here. Like, this game is going to be really big. It's really unique and special and give the game a lot of coverage, whereas most magazines were not. So as a result, EGM was one of the first really out of the gate to say, like, there's this game coming. It's amazing. Play it. But it really was a word of mouth thing, like you said. And I saw more and more people online talking about it, writing about it. You know, at the time I had started self-publishing my own zine because I was out of work and still felt the compulsion to do work even if it did nothing for me, you know, in terms of getting a job or making money.

So people, you know, several people wrote contributions for the zine about Grant of the Auto 3. And it was just kind of hard to ignore. So I was in New York City, actually, sometime early in 2002 and crashed with a friend of a friend. And they were playing GTA 3 and started up a fresh game and let me check it out. You know, I just kind of watched them as they went through the opening missions. and then they said, you know, whatever, and just kind of bugged off in the other direction and started doing stuff. And I was like, wow, this is really not what I expected at all. So I picked up a used copy of the game and played a lot of it. And like Bob, I never finished it

because the final mission is a load of horse hockey. It's really just poorly designed and brutal. But, you know, I kind of feel like, you know, as with many open world games, such as any Elder Scrolls game, following the story is kind of missing the point. Like, you just go out and do stuff. And this game really was a huge sandbox, and I wrote about it for a while in my site. And my main premise was, like, trying to be a law-abiding citizen in GTA-3, stopping all the stoplights and doing good deeds. And that's actually very hard to do.

It's a very difficult game to play while abiding by the law. So, yeah, I don't know. It was just really interesting that you could kind of just create your own fun in the game and do things you want. Like, you know, anytime I saw a place where I could do a jump, like jump over stuff, even if it wasn't one of the cool jumps that they gave you points for, I would try to find the first semi-truck that I could and see how far I could jump that stupid thing, despite its terrible speed and, you know, power and everything. So, you know, just random things like that was always interesting. So that's my GTA's story. That was half the podcast already. Well, I'm somewhere in between in that I was aware of Grand Theft Auto because I was working at a game software, etc.

In the late 90s, so I saw Grand Theft Auto one and two on store shelves. But I also looked at the back of the box and I was like, this is not for me. What is this? A game for ants? So when Granthold Auto 3. was coming, I had zero interest or hype for it. I didn't think anything of it. But I'm pretty sure it was EGM that I think I read and I saw the reviews and it sounded like, oh, this actually sounds really fun. And so I probably picked it up, you know, shortly after that. And I got into it

big time. It was definitely a game that took over. I played through it multiple times. I definitely completed 100%. It was definitely an early catalyst for me getting on GameFaQs. If you look at grant the daughter of three game if you use to this day you will still see some stuff maybe my name mentioned in there as far as like contributions or suggestions on how to do different missions and it just it completely dominated my playtime and you know once the game is over you can just you can just keep going so I mean I obviously in the months that followed I played through it many times over but also we would just I had so many save files we could save it in weird places you could use cheat codes and sort of set the world up how you

wanted to set it up. Our favorite thing to do was we activated a code that made time fly by super fast. So, like, the sun would rise and set and it would rain and then, you know, the weather would flow by. Did the radio stations play Koyani Scotsi? Everyone in the world is armed and everyone is aggressive. And the challenge was, in those conditions, see how far you could even survive. Because once the stakes are that high, you know, if you walk down the street, you know, if you walk down the street, you might get hit by a firebomb. It's crazy. So it just became this challenge that my friends and I would engage in to sort of see how long we could survive under these harsh conditions or what kind of mayhem we could round up. How fast could we get to six stars? How fast could

we get the cops on our tail? How much, you know, how big, how many cars could we crash at once? It just became this, yeah, a sandbox is a good term for, just sort of, you know, imagine virtual matchbox cars almost. Like, what, what can we do in this little, you know, virtual world we've been given, and how many, you know, how many ways can we break it without actually breaking it? You know, we'd never actually crash the game, but we would, we would crash everything we could possibly crash. And it's so easy to crash in that game because it feels like almost all the cars handle horribly.

Like, it's really weird. Like, people kind of looked at it as a racing game or a driving game, but there aren't a lot of cars that are a lot of, like, just pure, crazy fun to drive in the traditional sense. But that's kind of the fun of the game. that there's so much chaos just to the simple act of driving around that you kind of never know what's going to happen because the cars handle so poorly. I wanted to go back to what Diamond was saying about, you know, just the communal experience of this game.

And I can quote, or paraphrase Gary Butterfield, friend of the show. I think he called Grand Theft Auto 3, like the campfire of the early 2000s and that we all just stood around it staring at it and we would all just take turns like telling our own little stories. And by that, I mean, how long can I last? How long can I, you know, live with four or five stars? And just the sheer chaos that erupted from all of these different systems colliding was the most fun to have in that game. Not necessarily the story or the scripted missions, but just seeing the reactions in like what you could do when you poked and prodded at the world. That's great. Campfire. I love it. Because that was, that's what we were doing. And

let's be honest, it was 2001. So we were probably blazing something. So let's move on from this and talk about who made this, who made this game? It was developed, it's kind of a complicated history that I'm going to boil down very short. It's that officially it was developed by DMA designs, but they're now known as Rockstar North. The team is allegedly about

23 people who were working in Edinburgh, Edinburgh. I put my apology to the UK, working with Rockstar Games in New York City. These days, I believe Rockstar Games just owns everything and owns that studio, so it's all Rockstar now. But when it was in development, there were

several different names attached to it and different publishers. But today it's all under one Rockstar umbrella. So enjoy your synergy, folks. Yeah, Rockstar was one of the reasons I didn't pay any attention to this game, because who were they in 2001? Like, they were this company that came out and were like, we're going to be a big publisher. I kind of categorized them with gathering of developers, you know, that same sort of, like, big ambitions, big talk, not a lot of putting up and showing anything for it. Like Gamecock? Yes, exactly. But I feel like the only rock star game I had played before GTA3 was Oney by Bungy, which was, you know, one of those games.

It was all talk and, you know, there was a lot of hype about it. And then it turned out to be kind of like, eh, they, you know, all the, all the, the cool high concept stuff that they tried to do like design combat spaces that look just like real office spaces, you know, like real interior architecture. didn't translate into very good gameplay. So I just kind of saw the rock star label and said, but they certainly have developed much more clout since 2001. They certainly hit the ground running. So this game was produced by Leslie Benzies, a Scottish man. This was his first project as producer after joining DMA in 1995.

He would stick with the series all the way through GTA5, but then he left the company, and it sounds like it was not a mutual agreement. There was a lawsuit, and these days he's at Build a Rocket Boy Games. He created that studio, and they're working on something called Everywhere, which is supposedly going to be another big open-world adventure, but who knows, they're still hiring. There's not really much to show for that right now. Benzies also is allegedly one of the writing team.

Also, two more producers and co-writers. are Dan and Sam Houser, both British, both brothers. And they were both experienced with the previous Grand The Auto Games. But then they founded, they co-founded Rockstar Games, which is why this is so complicated. Now they owned it, but it was part of this other company, whatever. But they were all involved in the early work. They both produced and co-wrote Grand The Auto 3. Dan Houser stuck around through all the way until last year.

year. He left Rockstar last year and is now working on something called absurd ventures. Sam Houser has been the executive producer since GTA1. He is still at Rockstar. He's the current president. So of these three core individuals, he's the last man standing at the Grand The Auto Factory. It's a good thing I'm not editing this episode because if I, if I were, every time you mentioned the Housers, I would play the Doogie Houser like diary theme. So you have a little keyboard in front of you. Yeah, exactly. I do have a keyboard. It's called a computer. I think it's spelled differently. I think that Doogiehouser would have a W in it. Oh, details, details.

Yeah. They're also British, yeah. I think it's very important that the game, this game, which is really so seeped in American culture and reflecting American, you know, ideas back at us, it was largely made by British people. That's really, the lion's share of the work was done by British people. Yeah, I don't know how much we want to get into it yet, but I feel like this is. this is kind of a unique outcome of America's sort of prominence or place in the world. Like we export so much of our pop culture to the rest of the world that I feel like the world has a much better vision of what America is really about than America has of what the rest of the world is about. We don't really watch that much, you know, foreign media here, honestly, aside from like,

Japanese cartoons. That's pretty much it. So, you know, whereas, like, we just kind of funnel Hollywood down everyone's throats. So this is, yeah, this is like a reverse import sort of situation that works, whereas I don't think Americans could do this for, say, like, hey, let's, let's make a game about Scotland. It's just not going to happen. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens as time goes forward because I feel like, not to get too off topic, but I feel like in the current, you know, all streaming all the time world, I think there is more foreign media seeping into Americans' viewing diets. So I'd be very curious to see what happens, you know, maybe five, ten years from now when, when there are Americans who maybe grew up watching,

say, you know, Korean dramas or... Or the Great British Bake Off. Right. Yeah. All these other things. I think, you know... I mean, Doctor Who. Dr. Who has been popular in America for about 10 years now, and it was never popular for the first 40 years. That's true. We can make a very important. very convincing simulation of whales, of Cardiff. It does feel like this game was released right before our empire started crumbling.

And maybe the foundation was crumbling to begin with. But now it feels like we're number two in terms of pop culture relevance, or at least the audience that needs to be catered to the most as Americans. Well, the release environment is certainly very important. We'll get back to that in a second. I do want to cover several, there's a few more people on the list here. there were three credited writers, one of them being Dan Houser, two other people were credited for writing this game, one of them by James Worrell, who apparently is Scottish.

He was a credited writer through San Andreas, but then left Rockstar in 2006. These days, it sounds like he's working at Deep Silver. He's still doing narrative design, but he doesn't have a credit since the crew in 2014. Another writer is Paul Kourowski. I do not know where he's from, but he used to work for Cygnosis, the Owl Company, so I'm assuming he's British. He had a thanks credit on GTA 2, and then he has a lot of credits that are more about the auto design and lead vehicle designs on the subsequent games. So I guess he must have been more involved on the art side of things. His last writing credit was for APB, All Points Bolden,

back in 2010. And these days he's making something called Retroit in Finland for someone called Blackbox, which I think is a company that he owns. That sounds like NSA type work or something. Black block. I'm sorry, black blocks. Black block. The Cynosis connection is interesting because we didn't really talk about what DMA was before Grand Theft Auto, but they were the company that created Limmings. And they did a lot of games for Cynosis. So I feel like, you know, he's kind of a connection to the pre-GTA past of DMA design that kind of largely got swept aside after. after GTA 3 exploded in popularity, really. And, you know, Cygnosis was purchased by Sony, and now Sony owns all the early DMA properties like Limnings. So, yeah, I don't know, just kind of an interesting little weird sidebar of history there.

And we should tell our listeners, there will be no APB episode that will not be happening. I might do one on the arcade game. We'll be talking about APB, the arcade game from 80s. Exactly. All right. That's more worthwhile. That's, we're on for that one.

but yeah Jeremy thank you for mention that because I was looking for researching this episode I looked and I found a early British television interview at DMA Designs and this was back when they were making the first Grand Theft Auto and to this British television presenter he was talked to the audience and he was counting on the audience knowing Lemmings like I'm here at the studio that made Lemmings and now they're working on a new game it's about cars and it's called Grand Theft Auto you know so that was that was definitely their bread and butter before More brand of the autos kind of took over. Yeah, Limbing's was huge, huge, huge, especially in the UK.

It was, you know, a homegrown success, but it was a worldwide success, too. Like, I don't know how many copies of Limings I've owned in my lifetime, but it was a big deal. None for me, but I certainly played it at Friends' Houses. Actually, I think it was the first computer game, like, for Windows I ever bought. Wow. One more name I want to mention before we move on. He was not credited as a writer, but he was definitely integral to the duration. to this game, his voice is in the game, a man by the name of Laslow Jones, not his birth name,

graded from Harvard, what is this, Talking Simpsons? But no, he wrote material for radio stations, and he was a working DJ and producer in America. He hosted his own show, which we'll get back, we'll get to the radio channels in a bit, but he basically is the talk show host, and his, his name is Laslo in the game, so he's basically playing himself and talking to Colin listeners during the show. So it's like he's inserted himself into the game, but he was integral into sort of outlining and working on all the radio work. And he would stick with the series right up until last year. He apparently left Rockstar last year. But he was not credited as a writer, but he would later get more acknowledgement for how much work he put into this radio and audio

production. Because what starts here is sort of very distinctive thing that would continue on with the series. Yeah, I kind of wonder, like, the this sort of mass exodus from Rockstar of the core GTA3 people over the past year or two, I wonder if that's because they've kind of said, well, there's not really any more work for us here. Like the company is basically just stuck with GTA online and that they're making an insane amount of money with that. GTA5 is one of the two or three bestselling games of all time at this point. You know, is there going to even be a GTA6?

I'm sure at some point, but I don't think they're in any hurry to do that. So I have to imagine that for someone, like Laslo, you know, who was really kind of tied to the story-based games, like, what do you do at a company that stopped doing the stuff that you work on? And, you know, even if you have seniority, like, that can't be super satisfying. So, yeah, I don't know. I kind of miss the way GTA3 was and what the company was like at that point. and I'm not so crazy about what it, you know, transmogrified into.

Yeah, we should also mention that almost all the people we've mentioned so far, we're born in the early 70s, so they're all about, you know, 50 or late 40s right now. So they're, they certainly have many, many years left to make things. So I agree. If Grant the thought it was in the state it is today, where it's like, well, you know, it's online. We make, you know, a billion dollars just having, you know, people run around and shoot each other in our, you know, fake city. Why would we make a new city?

You know, why would we bother printing new discs and doing all the marketing and relaunching when we already have this incredibly successful product? So, yeah, maybe there is some sort of sense of like, well, then what's the point of having all the people around who are making, who designed this product and got us here? What's the point? Yeah, I mean, it's also possible that Sam Houser just hasn't seen a crime movie he wants to rip off lately. They stopped making them. Oh, that's the problem. I guess there's the wire, like GTA, Baltimore. That would be excellent.

Diamond, you went into DMA design and what they made. Did you ever look up Body Harvest in connection to Grand Theft Auto? Body Harvest. That sounds familiar, but no. What is that? Body Harvest, it was going to be an N64 launch game. It was not. It was delayed a few years.

It came out kind of unfinished, but it was made by DMA Design, had a very similar system to Grand Theft Auto and that you can get into any vehicle. You can go anywhere on the world map, but it's an alien invasion story. And, you know, it looks like an N64 game. So not a lot of people liked it or played it, but you can see the roots of Grand Theft Auto 3 in this game and them applying what they already did in GTA 1 and 2 to a 3D world in Body Harvest, but it's not a great game. There's also Space Station Silicon Valley also for N64, which was kind of, I feel like it was kind of spiritually a little, like a little bit of a predecessor to Body Harvest in a different way, or to GTA3 in a different way than Body Harvest. Body harvest was really about the destruction and kind of the craziness, whereas Space Station Silicon Valley is about, like...

You hijack animals in that game, right? Yes, it's got that thing where you, you know, you third birthday, your other people's brains or other animals' brains, but it has kind of that sort of open world and sort of goofiness you saw in GTA3 that's been kind of gradually ironed out of the series. is. I'm almost certain that either Leslie Benzies or Dan Houser had a creative role on that space station game. You mentioned Jeremy. That name sounds familiar when looking them up before. So there's definitely a connection there. So perhaps we should talk about what is Grand The Auto 3 in relation to what came before it?

Because at the same time, it's both different and very much the same ideas. The same ideas in that fact, you're in this fake city, and you're just this guy and you're running around and you can change cars and you commit crimes. But while those early games were a top-down perspective, which meant everything was, you know, the people were very, very small. This was a game where I was like, no, we're going to go full 3D. And this is a, you can have the camera right behind your character. You can actually cycle through several different camera angles in the game sort of at will. They actually include a top-down mode, I guess, just in case anyone wants to still play the game that way. I don't think they included it in future releases, but GTA3 still has a top-down mode.

But you can, there's a first-person mode when you're driving, which is very funny when you do the side view because your character. You get your character profile behind the wheel, and he's just not even looking to either side, but you can sort of look out the window. One of the camera modes is just called cinematic, where it just almost like becomes like a Resident Evil game, where as you drive around, the camera sort of pans, cuts to different sections, which makes it really hard to see where you're going, but just from a pure visual standpoint, it looks fun. But, you know, if you turn a corner and suddenly the camera's a different position, you're probably going to crash your car. Yeah, the top-down view is such a weird vestigial element. element of the game. It just doesn't, like, I feel like it was a limitation of the technology for PS1, so the early games were built around that. But as soon as they got to the ability to have an open 3D environment, it's properly rendered in 3D with a free camera, they were

really happy to leave that behind. But they kept it, you know, just for the, you know, the franchise faithful who are afraid of change. But I think for everyone else, the top-down camera, is just the one you have to, you know, hit the select button an extra time to skip past because it's horrible and no one wants it. I will say that when you go back to play this game and I played it for a few hours today, you'll be surprised what isn't there

and you would expect, oh, yeah, the right stick moves the camera. It does not move the camera. No. There is no way to move the camera manually. It took a long time for GTA as a series to have even like vaguely competent 3D combat and, you know, maneuvering in space. like GTA 4 is really where they finally said,

what if we made a game that was up to snuff with basically like everything else that was on the market in 2001? That took like the better part of a decade to get there. Yeah, I'm more familiar with the later games because I played those recently, but when I went back to this one, it's like, okay, when you pause, there's no, like, world map you can look at.

The only map available is the little one in the corner of your screen that shows you just basically what's around you. I'm pretty sure you can't run in the first GTA three game, And, yeah, there's a lot of, like, very, very simple things that you would expect to be there, but they would just add them on with the sequels and the PS2 generation. Yeah, like the lock-on system is there, but it's awful. It's bad. The running thing is funny in that there actually, there is a run button.

If you hold it down, though, you get, you run out of energy almost immediately, and you get tired and you pant. But what fans discovered is, if you tap it, you can basically run forever. So that, I think, is how what happened in later games where it's like you can hold the button down and you can sprint, which is faster, but then you run out of energy, but you can always tap it. So I think what became, what was probably a bug originally just became the design for Vice City and San Andreas. But if you're on foot, it's kind of hard to navigate this game on foot because the game is basically, you know, the maps are designed to be driven. So if you're on foot, you'll be running for a long time. It's probably to your advantage to get in a car, any car, which is how this game works.

There's a button dedicated to stealing cars, getting in and out of cars, whether it's your car or someone else's car. And most people don't even lock their doors in this game. Kind of a wild concept. You just walk around and the cars pull up to you and you push the button and that's sort of your guy as a tractor beam. You're locked onto that vehicle and you will, you can almost run forever trying to catch that car unless you change direction or get hit by something. So let's talk about that guy. So this guy, he's got nothing. He's nobody.

He has no name. he never talks he has almost no identity he's just this guy uh you know he opens the game in prison orange then he gets this sort of black leather jacket and uh cargo pants i think and that's it that's all you get with this guy and he never has a name later games have suggested his name is claude speed yeah but there's no there's actually no hint of that in the first game and this was apparently very deliberate although in a way it was kind of like uh i wonder which was more whether it was more a technical problem or more of a narrative choice. Because the quotes sort of dance on both sides of the issue, I think.

I mean, this game came out the same year that we had Final Fantasy 10, where they never referred to Titus by name. They just call them you or hey, or just kind of leave these awkward pauses while the written dialogue will write in your choice of character name because they couldn't figure out how to have all the NPC's voice a player selected name. So there's this really awkward thing where no one ever says Titus's name. And I think this is, you know, kind of, kind of born of that same period. You know, later Final Fantasy games would solve this issue by not letting you change your character name. And GTA kind of did

the same thing. Basically like, hey, here are some gameplay logistical problems. Let's solve them by giving the player less freedom and kind of, you know, dictating how they approach this. Well, from marketing standpoint, at least, they insist that this was a player-focused decision. We have a quote here, let's see, from Sam Hauser in 2011 for the 10th anniversary. He said, the lead player is the only person who never speaks. He has no personality. Or rather, he has your personality. The player has to have the freedom to act as they want, not as they think the model they are controlling should want. Yeah, I think a lot of the choices in this game are the fact that they really couldn't figure a lot of things out. I think this game does offer you the most freedom gameplay-wise

because they were just learning how to script in a 3-D environment with all these new systems interacting. And I think that the lack of scripting in the game is why you have so much freedom. But as they would learn how to use these tools, you would have less freedom with missions and things like that. And I think the main character could be a result of that too. Like, hey, if we make this guy a blank slate, we don't need to write lines for him. The choreography is less involved. We don't need to hire a voice actor. I think a lot of it was built around inefficiency,

I'm sorry, efficiency, and also not being familiar with developing for the PS2 in that generation. Absolutely, because there's a quote, we have a quote from Dan Houser almost the same time, and he said, partly because of the way we were doing animation, we didn't know if we could have more than one person speak. So really, all the game's cutscenes are, you know,

you as your guy, walk into the scene, an actor, usually a very famous actor, basically delivers a monologue to you, and then you just walk out and like, okay, well, now I've got my mission, and then you start their mission. So yeah, probably a little bit of column A, column B as far as what they wanted versus what they could even do. But as the story goes, you are this guy, and you rob a bank, and in the middle of your bank robbery, your girlfriend Catalina just shoots you. She's like, you suck. I'm leaving goodbye, and she shoots you. So you have to go to jail for 10 years. But on the way to jail, you get lucky. Some guys.

Guys with big guns stop the police, they rescue somebody else, not you, but your character and this guy named Eight Ball, escape from the police van, eight ball says, my hands are all messed up, you have to drive, and then boom, game starts, here's tutorial, learn how to drive, learn how to follow the map, learn how to find the hideout, and you just go from there. And the game just sort of becomes a series of escalating sort of, you know, do this, now do this, now do this, and more and more things open up to you from there. But that's where it starts. Yeah, I think even in that opening, they blow up the bridge, too, to kind of trap you in a smaller area before they let you have access to more of the world. So I was surprised with replaying this. Like, the onboarding is very good. A lot of people probably had never played a 3D game like this before.

And some of the missions are just, like, drive 100 feet and just to get used to driving. So I was surprised just how, you know, the onboarding process was pretty smooth in this game. Yeah, one thing I really like it. about this game is that even from the very beginning, like it has kind of a structured mission approach, like, hey, go to eight balls hideout, do this, do that.

But I mean, right from the very start, as soon as they give you control of your character or a clawed, if you prefer, you can basically just say, I don't want to do that. And you know, nip off in some other direction and go do random stuff

and start doing like secret jumps and, you know, finding cash piles and stealing cars and doing police missions. Like, you can really just kind of blow off the story immediately as soon as the story starts, which is, you know, a pretty rare sort of freedom that you definitely don't get in the more recent games. Yeah, I think eight ball will probably sit in the car with you as long as you're driving. I assume if he dies, probably you have to restart the mission. But still, yeah, you can do whatever you want right from the start. Yeah, I always, I always enjoy these kind of open adventure type games.

where, you know, you'll have companion characters who are supposed to be with you for a fixed amount of time. But if you don't fulfill certain objectives, they'll stay with you. I did that with Final Fantasy 12, where, um, I can't remember the kid's name, but he's like, you know, a teenager, uh, royalty who fights alongside you for a little while. And I was just like, you know, I like having this extra character in my party just to kind of beef out the, uh, the combat roster. So I just, I blew off his missions or, you know, his objectives and kept him in the party until the point where he was so grossly underpowered compared to the enemies we were fighting that he would just constantly die. So at that point, I was like, I guess I got to get rid of this guy and, you know,

finish his missions. But, you know, I'm grateful for games. Whenever games give you that degree of freedom, like, you're not supposed to do this. Like, clearly this game was not designed around this. but you know if that's how you want to do it it's your game do it it's fine and there's a lot of that in GTA3 which is one of the things I really like about it one thing that struck me when I was replaying it today and I don't think I seriously sat down to replay this game

since maybe 2002 is that I have learned so much more about how to control these types of games in 20 years and I was just reflecting upon my experience 20 years ago where it's like this world is so big it's so intimidating I don't know where to go this is so hard this is so frustrating but

it's still a hard and frustrating game that is barely holding together, but I was just surprised at how good I was doing, just because, oh, I've had two decades of training for this kind of experience, and it was still a new, fresh experience in 2001 for most people. Yeah, I don't think I had played many 3D games up to this point, partly by choice, but also partly just because a lot of the early stuff just wasn't for me, and certainly this wasn't a game I expected to like, but boy, it really sucked me in once I got involved. Yeah. The 3D games I played before this, because I had a PlayStation one, they were basically, yes, it's an open world, but it's a series of rooms. Even if you're outside, like Mega Man Legends was like the open world game I played

before this, it's a series of rooms with skyboxes. And if you're in a dungeon, there are doors with loading screens, but everything on this game was streaming off the disc. So there was no waiting. Like, everything was reactive. There was no waiting around for anything except for when a mission was loading, and that was it. Yeah, this was very much a game that I think only existed because of the move to DVD format. There was no way to create something like this on a CD-based system. It wouldn't be possible. And I think they say as much during the interviews at the time.

One big hook for me was the setting. This game takes place in Liberty City, which I believe the manual describes as the worst place in America. Some tough competition. Well, things are getting... It's been 20 years. There is a town in Ohio called Liberty, Ohio. It's pretty bad, too.

So I chuckled upon seeing where I was in this game. But, yeah, so you get locked in this one part of town called Portland, which is very much kind of the rundown part of town. It's a lot of, you know, you get the Red Light District, Chinatown, a bunch of factories, some docks, you know, a trash heap. Once the bridge is repaired, you can move on to Staunton Island, which is very much more of a more urban uptown feel. There's a Times Square. There's a big stadium. and eventually once the drawbridge is repaired or something, and there's a tunnel, you can get to Shoreside Vale, which is much more suburban.

It kind of feels like maybe, you know, Westchester or New Jersey, if you follow New York logic, there's big houses, there's an airport, and there's a big dam, which is where the big finale was, which was apparently always their intention was to finish the game of the dam. The interesting quote, though, a little quote from Dan Houser, he insisted, he says, Liberty City was not particularly meant to be New York. That was meant to be a hybrid of generic American city, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, Philly, an old post-industrial American city. GTA-3 was America. Now, me as a New Yorker, I read it as New York, I'll be honest, but you are both not New Yorkers.

Did you take it as New York, or what did you think when you first played this game? I read it as New York. Oh, okay, yeah, me too, because I had barely left my suburban town. And after, you know, while living in cities and working in real cities and traveling and visiting real cities, it doesn't seem that New Yorkie to me anymore. Yeah, I guess, you know, my point of reference in 2001 was that I hadn't been to that many big cities. I'd been to Dallas, Detroit, and New York City. And it definitely seemed much more New York City, especially with the kind of boroughs and the bridges. But, yeah, now that I've, you know, I've been to far more cities, I'm much better travel.

Like, I can see some Portland, Oregon with the bridges and the different, you know, the sections. I suppose I could see like Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, but I still feel like it definitely has, it evokes more New York to me than anything else, for sure. I feel like GT4 would make it much more New York, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah. But at this point, you could sort of plausibly say, oh, it's any city. Yeah, I mean, starting with Vice City, they really said, let's find. find a real American analog and model it closely on that. And then you get to

San Andreas, which is very consciously modeled after L.A., San Francisco, and Las Vegas, and miniature. Like, it's very clear that those are what they were building after. But, yeah, this does have more of that sort of like American city that was thriving in the 1960s and maybe isn't doing so well now.

And I'm sure that when I played San Andreas, I thought, oh yeah, LA is that close to San Francisco. You can just drive there real quick. But then you had to drive it yourself and realized, oh my God, it's a vast wasteland. It's eight hours and you smell cows the entire time. It's not great. Oh, boy. I can't wait for future history 101 today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six. Gather round, students. It is time. Time to learn.

Podford University, where history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well. Sequelcast Two in Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a France. franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit, and sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well, and now it's part of the Greenlit podcast network.

Oh, Lassie, we don't need to rescue Timmy. He likes the well, well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father. Lassie, I told you to lay off the spoilers. So, Grand of Auto 3, the gameplay, what does this game actually play like? Well, it's sort of like you go where you want and you do what you want, but around the map you get these little spots and that's where you can take a mission. There's lots of ways to get a mission. You can either go and take a mission from a crime boss or you can pick up a phone.

and someone will call you over the phone and tell you, you know, somebody to do something, or there are icons scattered around the map where you just touch the icon and, oh, here's a mission. And, of course, there are actually those vehicle missions where you get in a vehicle and you can start a mission there. So the game is very much open about what do you want to do and when do you want to do it. The only real caveat is that you can't do two things at once, or at least you shouldn't be able to. If you watch speed runs of the game, they get through the game very quickly by doing two things at once, which is magic. But, you know, for us playing the PlayStation 2 in 2001, there was no magic. You just start a mission and you finish the mission and then you either do something else or you start a new mission.

What did it? Sam Houser called it. GTA 3 is like a cross between a gangster movie and an RPG. Zelda meets Goodfellas? Sure. I will say the open world is limited to the outside because indoors only existing cutscenes in this game for the most part. Yeah, almost. Yeah. I think each game they do a little bit better job of giving you PlayStation.

to enter, but in this first game, there's almost, there's almost no buildings you can enter, almost none. Yeah, I think the first GTA that really did that well was San Andreas, where there were, you know, like events that took place inside buildings, but you still had the freedom to move around. Here, yeah, it is basically just like, you enter a box and a cutscene happens. This was, this was definitely no shin moo where you could go into someone's house and, like, rummage through their drawers and, you know, read papers that were, buried in their drawers and so on and so forth. It was not that level. Well, a big thing for me that

I really enjoyed about this game is the fact that the missions are, as you said, Jeremy, they do very much, they do a great job of sort of slowly unfolding the world to you and letting you sort of explore and also like get used to the things. But eventually they get more complicated and the missions can be sort of like, oh, go to this. Now go shoot this guy. Oh, now you've got to escape and you've got to make sure not to crash this car too many times because, you know, the boss wants it in good condition or whatever. So it's a great sort of gradual escalation of stakes and larger and larger missions. And the variety is pretty, I mean, you know, it's, if you look on paper, and I'm sure, you know, when we get to controversy stuff, like the people who just looked at it from afar

thought it was all just murder. But I was like, no, there's actually a lot more in here than just shooting things. You know, there's, there are violent missions, but there's also racing missions, and there's escape missions, and there's sort of rounding things up missions. And, And some of the other stuff is kind of weird. There's even one where it's, I almost forgot about this one. There was a, there's like these vans parked around town that have remote control cars in them. And if you take them, you can use remote control cars to sort of attack other gangs with these little tiny, you know, RC cars, which I'm assuming is a Deadpool reference. Not the comic, like the movie, the Deadpool with Clint Eastwood.

But yeah, there's just this, if you get in a taxi cab, you can drive the taxi. It's basically crazy taxi without, you know, the, you know. The... Take me to Kentucky Fried Chicken. No Tower Records. Yeah. Without, yeah, without the recnezzable brands. Yeah, going back to this after 20 years, I also remember what frustrated me originally in that, like, there's very little character persistence, and they would address that in later

games, but there's a very arcade-y, like, kind of lives idea to this game, and that it's not game over when you die, but so much is stripped away from you when you die that I found myself reloading a lot when I was playing this originally, just because the punishment is pretty harsh for dying and it's very easy to die too. Yeah, you go to the hospital, they take away all your weapons. Another thing that

really lacks in terms of persistence is the world in this game. Well, no, actually, that's not true. It's kind of weird that there's like some persistence that's saved in the world and some that isn't.

But one of the interesting things about this game is that there is like the state of the world before a mission starts sometimes carries into a mission. mission, which is something they eradicated in subsequent games. Like when you start a mission in GTA San Andreas or GTA 4, it basically resets the world and says, okay, now you're in like the world instance of this mission.

Whereas in this game, like if you're, you know, you have stuff going on in the open sandbox world and you start a mission, you know, sometimes the things that you've done do carry into the mission. And there's one mission in Chinatown, I remember, that you have to, like, assassinate someone or something and he's trying to get away. And it's really, really difficult. And eventually, you know, we figured out that if you just, like, park your car at a certain place before the mission starts, it'll stay there when the mission begins. And the person who's trying to escape will be blocked. And it makes the mission much easier to complete because, you know,

there's this car that you parked there kind of in advance of that mission. And I guess the folks at Rockstar decided this is an exploit. This isn't, this isn't fun. This isn't good. This isn't what we want. It's not our vision.

So they took that away in future games, which was always a really big disappointment for me because finding those ways you could shift the world around in your favor and kind of carry these things you do into missions. That was a big part of GTA 3's fun, just like the fact that, you know, the unpredictability and freedom of a

sandbox could carry into, you know, something that is much more structured and scripted. And there wasn't really that much of a hard divide. Absolutely. That's what you're describing exactly how and why I kept playing the game for months after, you know, after I finished it, quote unquote, you know, I would do stuff like that. You know, any time, any mission I had to do involved racing, I would steal a bus and park it in front of all the other cars and then get in my car and then I would take off every time.

Yeah, I forgot about the persistence between missions or so like I parked my car haphazardly to start a mission and you know, go into Luigi's or whatever. When I came out, there was a huge traffic jam because while I was talking to Luigi, my car was blocking traffic

and it sucked because I had to pull out but there was a cop car that was stuck right behind my car so I had to be very, very gentle that I didn't bump the cop car and get one star while starting the mission. It's sort of interesting.

There must be some sort of programming rules to what stays and what doesn't, because if you watch speed runs for this game, they know exactly what to do to make sure a car stays and whether a car doesn't stay, and they exploit that to get through missions quickly. But there's definitely times where if something leaves view

for too many seconds, the game will just erase it, which can be frustrating if you saw a nice car and you decided to maybe turn a corner, oh, wait, I want to go back and get that car. That car might be gone. Yeah, especially on the original hardware. So it's so crazy that I could just play. I downloaded this for my PS5 and I'm playing it with a PS5 controller on my PS5.

It looks still like a PS2 game. But I remember on the original hardware, if you are going too fast, the game can't stream the city and fast enough. So like parts of it aren't there as you're driving through it. It's something I did remember about the original game. It's like the technology, it just barely worked, but it worked enough to convince you you're in a real world or at least real enough for the time. Yeah, I mean, from a draw distance standpoint, it was better than, say, Nintendo 64, but it was still like, it was at the edge. It was at the edge of like, yeah, you still saw some, some things sort of pop in cars would appear out of nowhere sometimes. So, let's talk about cars, because one of the interesting things about this game is the fact that there's almost no sort of music in the sense that we normally think of in games.

You know, there's no, there's a few melodies here and there, but most of the game audio is, you know, I don't, I don't pronounce this name, is it diagetic or diagetic? Diagetic? Diagetic? Yeah. It's the music, all the stuff is actually in the game itself. You know, if you get in a car. the radio is on. It's usually set to some station, but you can set any vehicle to listen to any station you want. And all these stations basically play on a giant loop. There's some time or

somewhere where it's streaming audio to your car. Supposedly, there's three and a half hours of radio in the game. And as far as I can tell, it's all licensed music. They didn't make any original music for those radio stations. It's just like, no, here's some music that you might know. And the music sort of varies in a theme. You know, there's a classical music station. There's like a reggae station. There's a, like, a techno station. The aforementioned Laslo, that's a whole station that's just talk radio. So it's just a bunch of like original comedy bits.

Although every station has fake commercials, which are also designed to sort of make you laugh a little bit. Yeah, the amount of work put into that really surprised me in 2001. It's very easy to do now. But at the time, like, Crazy Taxi came out for the Dreamcast in, what, 2000? And there were maybe four songs on it. So when I was playing the game, I'm like, oh, my God. like this just keeps going and there's all these stations and even though i heard the laslo uh station on a loop like 400 times i would still put it on just to have like wow there is a little

like talk radio show happening in my video game it's very very novel for the year 2001 so i'm i'm going to argue with you diamond about the claim that it's all licensed music i think gt83 is unique in that a lot of the music in the game was actually composed for the game or at least was not, you know, like licensed from popular radio hits. I'm looking it up now, and it said a large number of tracks were contributions by real artists, but Craig Connor and Stuart Ross created the original tracks, often with vocals and performances, by other musicians. There was actually quite a bit of music that was, you know, composed specifically for here.

Obviously, the classical music was not, but like the reggae, radio station, uh, looks like all of it is, uh, by the band scientist or maybe the artist scientist, um, pretty much everything on, what is this? Head radio was composed by Craig Conner or, uh, co-composed by Craig Connor. So yeah, the, it's, you know, I, I remember not really recognizing just about any of this music when, uh, when I, when I heard it, as opposed to, Vice City, which was really kind of remarkable in that they basically went crazy with licensing music. And it was, you know, all period appropriate from the 80s. And it was all stuff that would have been on the radio or just about all stuff. Whereas here, there's only like one or two stations that are

like, oh, hey, it's Debbie Harry. But other than that, it's, it's kind of unknown music. But, you know, this game made so much money that I think they could finally do. do a Quentin Taratino and say like, here's the stuff we like. All right. Well, I guess I'm showing my ignorance there because my go-to channel was Flashback FM, which was basically the Scarface soundtrack. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there were a couple of stations that definitely did have popular hits, but a lot of it was original.

I was very curious, though, what was your go-to stations back of the day? I tended to go to flashback a lot And, you know, I listened to chatterbox a lot Until I, you know, had heard all of the jokes and commentary and said, well, okay, I've had enough of that. But I wasn't really that picky about music in this game compared to some of the later ones where, you know, like San Andreas, I would get the country station when I got into a car and be like, oh, no thanks. Unless I was driving like in the countryside and then I was like, yeah, I've got a big old truck in the countryside. I need some country music.

You got to hear Queen of Hearts. Exactly. Yeah. So this one, I wasn't too picky about the music. It was just like whatever it was on was on. And I did appreciate the fact that, you know, like every car you got into would just have some other station at random. I don't know if there was a process to kind of defining which cars, what types of cars would have which music or if it was totally random. But it just felt like, hey, you know, you're intruding into other people's lives.

And it definitely kind of, you know, in a very subtle, small way, kind of underscored the general theme of the game. I think different gangs had music they listen to on the regular. That would make sense. Like, there's a reggae gang. So, like, their car would always be on the reggae station. And I think the mobsters usually had the classical music on. But, yeah, random passerby, I think it would just be, yeah, probably just a shuffle. How about you, Bob?

I would usually do the talk radio station just because this was pre-podcast. and it was just very, such a novelty. I mean, now I listen to the podcast while I play video games for the most part, unless it's a very story-based game. So I guess that's where it all started for me. And I think the classical station was fun because it was just a bunch of a well-known, up-tempo classical numbers that were just fun to drive to. But this time I'm playing it, I was like, oh, actually,

I know what these old songs are now in the oldie station, or I guess the 80s station. Back when the 80s was only 15 years away. So, yeah, I did enjoy that this time around. Well, I remember the classical music station was very much integral to the television ads. Like, once this game started getting big and they started advertising it on television, it would all be scenes of sort of chaos set in slow motion with the classic music behind it. That's right.

So that sort of became the image of like, do what you want, and, you know, here's this sort of opera singer behind you while you set people on fire. Some of the original music is actually pretty good. Like, I really like the opening title track, just the very classy piano theme. And also the little jingle that plays when he finished. a mission is just very satisfying. They really nailed that. I always enjoyed the the Price's Right font that they used. It gives it, I don't know, like, there's something weird about, yeah, I can't even put my finger on it. Like, I'm someone who pays a lot of attention to typography and fonts. And there's just something very like, okay, so you know in the game

Tomba, the way anytime you get a mission, it kind of presents it with this sort of gong show quality like you know it gives you like these bells and buzzer sounds and the the text of the mission name appears and kind of wobbles around the screen and it just feels kind of game showish like this actually uses a game show typeface and it does something to kind of soften the seriousness of some of what you're doing like the severity of the crimes you're committing when it becomes like hey you just won a prize you you know you blew up a school bus good job uh i don't know. It was an interesting choice, but I think one that really works. So we've talked a lot about crimes you commit in this game. I feel like we should

probably address how the police work in this game because it's sort of an interesting mechanic. They basically, they're all over town. They sort of just, they just show up. There are police stations, but you never know when a policeman might just come by. They basically ignore you, but if you commit a crime around them, or if you commit too many crimes, you know, even sight and seen, the police will just become aware of you and you get a wanted star. You start with one and the severity of your crime increase, you know, gradually. And the more and more stars you have, the more the police try to come get you. And if you only have one star, they will quickly ignore you. Like, you can just, you can just keep driving. I've, I've run over people and

get a star, but once you leave the field of view, the cops, like, whatever. Once you get to two or three, usually you have to, you have to shake the cops willingly, otherwise they will just keep coming. If you gently bump their car, you get a star, and that is very nerve-wracking. When you're on a mission and, like, there's a cop car in front of you or behind you, or you're turning, and the camera's bad, and you're about to hit a cop car, it's bad news. But you are, you know, you are playing as a white guy, so they're not, they're not going to go out of their way to hassle you and let's just cause trouble. And I guess a lot of this game is,

it's very old school in that there's no map you can go to when hitting pause. So you have to kind of memorize where the bribes are on the map. You have to memorize where a lot of things are in this game because there's no like GPS system in the series yet.

So a lot of it is like, okay, where is the pay and spray? Where is the bribe? Where is health? A lot of it, just like knowing what's around you that you can access without necessarily having time to look it up or, you know, navigate your way through that with like a GPS.

That's a big reason why I feel like whenever I start a new game or whatever I get to a new section of the game, I would always play the side missions like taxi or the vigilante cop car stuff just to drive around and get the sort of feel of the area. Because I feel like that was the most important thing because once, yeah, if you're in trouble and you need to escape, you need to know where to go because, yeah, once you cross certain line, the cops will not stop, you know, and they get more and more aggressive. Eventually, at six stars, it basically turns to the Army shows up, and the Army has a tank, an actual tank, which is almost indestructible. They never shoot you with a tank initially enough, but if you steal the tank, you can shoot things.

And I'm almost certain this whole tank thing was included because of that viral video from the late 90s, like pre- YouTube era of the guy in San Diego who had a tank and, like, drove around the highway. Did anyone else see that one in the early 2000s? Yes. There's actually, like, a few sitcom episodes that have a... story based on that just because it was one of the craziest things that happened before much crazier things happened in our world. Right. I mean, I know today, you know, in our fast and furious era, you know, cars and tanks, it's very blazze. But like, in 2001, that was the height of, you know, shocking scenes to see a tank drive on the highway. So, let's talk about

the violence. Let's get to the Wikipedia controversy section of this game. Because, yes, You can basically do what you want. If you want to kill someone in the street corner, you can do that. If you want to run people over, you can do that. If you want to shoot the cops, you can do that. They'll get angry at you, but you can do it as much as you want. It was rated M for mature in the United States, but it definitely got a lot of attention because, yeah,

you had the freedom to commit crimes. Beyond the fact that the game makes you commit crimes to advance the story, you had the freedom to sort of do what you wanted in this sort of playground. ground. And that shocked a lot of people, even though the game itself is not actually, there's no actual real gore in the game. There's very little blood. There's a code you can turn on to make the blood appear. And I think the PC version might have that on by default. But the PS2 version, you know, if you shoot someone, there's some blood on the ground and they disappear. And they leave a little like bundle of money behind them. But it's nothing, it's nothing on the scale, say, like a Mortal Kombat or anything. Yeah, it's not like manhunt or something like that. Yeah, I guess you have to go back to the time because, you know, there was a freak out over the video game death race. And if you go play that, like at the Musei Mechanique in San Francisco, you can see like, I'm just like running over stick figures. But there was shock over that in the media.

And obviously we can see looking back, like a lot of the shock was played up to help people's careers and to give people like a platform and to let people write books. a lot of it was very insincere. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, you had games like Phoenix, which is basically a Space Invaders, Gallaget-type game that just happens to have aliens that kind of look like birds. And people were like, oh, that's this terrible. You know, ASPCA or whatever was complaining that it's promoting the murder of animals.

And I can't imagine anyone play that game and said, ah, yes, finally, I can realize my dream of murdering birds in space. But, yeah, this was very much kind of a long. those lines. I think part of the problem is that people had never really, most people, I think, had never seen a game driven by systems that allowed players a lot of freedom and, you know, just kind of the opportunity to do whatever they want. And the systems were designed to interface with each other. And sometimes you would get outcomes that the developers didn't necessarily expect. Like I'm sure you're going to mention the prostitutes and the money. But, But, you know, that wasn't something that I think they sat down and deliberately said, hmm, how can we promote violence against women? It was just like, well, let's see, you know, what are some things that happens, you know, in a world where people commit horrible crimes all the time.

You know, there's going to be prostitution. There's going to be theft. There's going to be murder. And it's just that you can actually do all those things together. And when you do that, you know, you get one certain outcome that if it was, were scripted if it were, you know, deliberate, yeah, that's, that's pretty horrible. But I, I think you can look at this game and pretty obviously understand that that was not like a a prescribed thing to do. It wasn't something that the developers were like, at no point

does the game push you to do that. You know, and there's a lot of, a lot of instances like that where you can just say, well, I can do this one thing. I can do this other thing. What happens if I combine them, and you get some sort of weird, random, sometimes very violent, sometimes hilarious output or outcome. Yeah, we should definitely talk about the sex workers. This game has women who walk on the street. They're dressed a certain way. If you pull up in a car and get their attention, honk their horn, they get in the car with

you, and if you drive somewhere, you know, less conspicuous, you have sex with them, but it's all just sort of, I mean, it's a comic book version of sex. Like the car bounces up and down. There is no sex animation. If you do the first-person view, you can see your character and the sex worker just sitting perfectly still inside the car while it's bouncing. So there's absolutely no... Check out my suspension, baby. It's not a lot of children the wrong thing about sex.

You just sit there, you don't move. But yes. So what got a lot of people alarmed is that, yes, once the deed is done, and by doing this, you spend money and you get some health back, once the act is done the woman gets out of your car and walks away if you kill her you get money so you basically get a refund and a lot of people interpret that as some sort of

intentional functionality right which I don't think is the case right no any any civilian you kill you get money for her yes they're going to drop some cash so it's not like I mean yeah it's not like

you're actually getting a refund it's just this type of character carries this much money in the in the game's script. And you could do the deed and go out and kill the person next to the woman you were just with. And you're going to get some money for it. So yeah, yeah, it's just, you know, people who don't understand how systems exist and work and how processes like this function, like freaked out or, you know, created some sort of artificial outrage. But, but in reality, like, it's, I just feel like it's really obvious. that it was not intended to be some sort of degenerate, horrible, you know, like, go, go abuse women and be violent against sex workers.

That was definitely not the intention of this game. Yeah, I think if you want to have a conversation about the problems of this game story, I would say it's a lot of a lot of stuff. You look at the creative team, and it's almost entirely white men. So when you look at the story, the story revolves around the men in the game. There's only, there's one crime boss who's a lady. She works for the yakuza. She is kind of queer-coded, kind of a dragon lady stereotype. And, you know, the plot revolves around your ex betraying you.

So, of course, she becomes like the last villain of the game. But there's also another woman you meet named Maria who works, it's like a girlfriend of the mob, the mob boss. and because she becomes infatuated with you you don't do anything obviously her interest in you creates that gets the mob against you so that basically motivates the second half of the game where you are sort of stuck with Maria

avoiding the mob but it's like this is a one side of relationship and at the very end of the game you basically have to rescue Maria from your ex-girlfriend and famously when the at the very end of the game Maria is talking to you and she's talking about mile a minute about all the things she's very happy about And then there's a fade to black

And there's this gunshot And then she's very quiet So that's the elements of the game That I think are less friendly Less jokey I think I mean it's a product of its time The product of the creator's ages And also I think like it's a game that's built on tropes

And tropes obviously are old There are things that have been around for a long time And things that have been around for a long time They can be sexist, they can be homophobic And you see that a lot in these early games that are basically just about pastiches of things you've seen, pastes of tropes you've experienced, yeah. Yeah, there are gay, there are characters coded as gay who walk around the streets. I think they're like construction workers or whatever.

And when you pass them, they just say lines from village people songs, you know, just randomly. Yeah, it's like, they're like from the gay steel mill on the Simpsons, basically. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I certainly am not defending all of this game's social politics by any means. It definitely is kind of tough to swallow these days in some respects. But, you know, I think kind of, as you said, Diamond, if you're going to go after this game, go after it against the things that are actually there,

like deliberate. Don't just, you know, invent problems to go after. Because that's like, it's just disingenuous and it makes you look like an idiot. I think the problem, too, is that with these stories that this game is taking from by filmmakers and, you know, TV shows and stuff like that, The point of the stories is not usually like, these guys are cool, and it's cool to be them. It's usually like, no, this is a living nightmare in all of their lives and poorly. When you're a video game in trying to empower the player, you necessarily have to make him cool and make the things you're doing cool, which is against the point of a lot of these stories that are being borrowed for Grant Theft Auto.

I guess we'll give a quote here from Leslie Benzies from February 2001. He told IGN, the violence has always been bridled by comedy. These games are not meant to be taken seriously. and the styling, we hope, makes this very clear. They are pure fantasy, just in an urban setting. So, and, yeah, the game is definitely satirical in its nature. You know, listen to the radio. It's full of just jokes about American culture, American settings.

As I recall, there was a joke about, like, internet cafes at the time, just, you know, which was a very new concept. But, yeah, there were, you know, there was, in fact, you know, some people took it very seriously. Even GameSpy declared it the most defensive game of 2001 as part of their, yearly roundup, as Bob implied at the top, it was literally banned in Australia. You could not buy this game for quite some time. They had to re-release it and edit it, removing all prostitution elements to get an MA-15 rating. But then just two years ago, it was re-rated as R18 plus, which apparently is a new rating that did not exist in 2002. Finally, a game too criminal for Australia.

Yeah. And there was a rather famous incident in June 2003. Two teenagers, William and Joshua Buckner, stepbrothers, they took rifles from a locked room in their house, and they started shooting at trucks on the highway. And they said that, oh, they did this because they saw it in Grant the Otto III. Unfortunately, they killed, they killed one person and wounded another. And they were sentenced to an indefinite term estate custody because both were minors. But eventually the families of the victims hired Jack Thompson. Yes, that Jack Thompson. The enemy of gamers. And they sued Sony. They sued the publisher. They sued Walmart because Walmart sold to the game.

They sued them for $246 million. Try as I might, putting in all the names. I could not find out what happened to the suit. I'm assuming it was dismissed, but I never found a new story about what happened. Just many, many stories about the initial crime and what Jack Thompson said to get his name in the paper. Yeah, I mean, that's all Jack Thompson really cares about is getting that initial coverage out there. You know, an especially frustrating thing for me about Grand Theft Auto. This is jumping forward a few games, but like we went through this in 2001.

We went through the scandal. We went through the commentary. We went through the Jack Thompson era. And then it happens again with San Andreas, the hot coffee thing. And I was a younger, much younger man, but I thought, I mean, I was probably naive. And I thought, like, I thought we had this conversation. Little did I know that, no, the conversation is never over. It really isn't.

Nope, it's just a cycle. But speaking of, but speaking of conversations, so yeah, but speaking of conversations and controversies, So, yeah, this game came out in October 2001, and there was a very large incident that loomed over it. We are, in fact, recording this in America on September 11th, the 20th anniversary of September 11th. So that was a big deal. It was, in fact, it delayed the game by three weeks. One reason being that Rockstar was based in New York City, and they were downtown, so they couldn't get to work. but also the fact is, you know, after September 11th, things got really crazy in America

and attitudes changed very quickly and everyone was very worried about public perception of what was happening and what was in the media and some things had to change. It's always been debated how much changed in this game. One thing that was very obvious, though, because we had preview images, the police cars, you know, they, again, they didn't. deny that Liberty City was supposed to be New York City, but the police cars looked exactly like NYPD police cars. They had the exact blue and white paint job. So those were changed. In the final game, they are black and white. Beyond that, it's kind of unclear what was changed

exactly. They've implied that something was done about air traffic. You know, the game has airplanes that fly over the city. You can't get in the planes, but you can see them. They talked about changing the flight paths to avoid buildings. There is an airplane in the game called the Dodo. It has very short wings, so it's very hard to fly it. So rumors persisted that the plane was supposed to be there and flown normally, but that they took the out. They shortened the wings.

But in my opinion, why would you call the Dodo if you could fly normally? I feel like that was probably always the idea they had. Yeah, so quotes from the time, or quotes from after the fact, actually, Dan Houser said, did 9-11 impact to sign decisions only in terms of things that would be overtly offensive, like planes that could fly into buildings. There was also a character in the game called Darkl. Dataminer's found dialogue in the game that was not in the finished version, but they found it hidden in the game code. References to him, references to missions about blowing things up. But Rockstar insists that this was not removed because of 9-11.

They said it was removed much earlier. They said it was, what's a quote here from a Q&A? in 2011. Darko was just a crazy bum who gave you some crazy missions. They were removed a few months before the game was done and long before 9-11 because they just weren't as good as the rest of the game and totally they were a little odd. Yeah, I really have to wonder if this game would have been as big as it was without 9-11. I feel like this game was important for a lot of people, even if they weren't aware of it, because it really helped recontextualized violence as something that could be fun. We were just processing a tragedy that we had never experienced

before most of us. And I feel like fast forward 20 years, it just shows how a nerd would become to tragedy because basically a 9-11s worth of people, they die every day of COVID, but virus and pandemic-related video games and media still come out. Like, as COVID was erupting in the States, Resident Evil 3 remake came out. It's about a virus that kills you. I think it just shows how desensitized we've become to, you know, things that are reflected in our media that are happening in real life. But whatever happened, whether it's fueled by or in spite of, who can say, but this game was a huge hit, tremendous hit. As we all sort of said, it was kind of based on word of mouth at first.

And then was the marketing push in, I think it got a lot bigger push. And it sold at least two million copies in 2001. MPD said it was the best-selling game of 2001. According to online sources, it's moved about 14 million copies since. As I said, it's been ported to so many different devices. You can play it right now on your PlayStation 4 or allegedly PS5. I don't know. I've never seen one of those.

I somehow have one. I envy you. This basically transformed Grand Theft Auto from a weird PC-first franchise into a AAA PlayStation, you know, huge hit. Vice City arrives less than one year later and sells even bigger. You know, at that point, of course, you know, the hype machine is in full effect. I can tell you, me and all my friends, we were all like, waiting at our local Babbage's, I believe, to get our copy of Vice City. So, like, from here on, everything is different.

Everything changes. And I think this is sort of like the genesis of what is sort of like the modern open world game. I mean, I don't think it was the first open world game, but certainly like, I believe this is the template that most open world games have sort of model themselves after. If not Assassin's Creed, but of course, they probably took it from Grant the Thuddle in the first place. Yeah, I mean, this game is preceded by Shenmu, which did a whole lot of open world type things a lot more, you know, a lot better and with more detail and more care than GTA3. But it didn't have free form, you know, open-ended violence and the ability to jump into a car and just do all kinds of crazy stuff. And there's something to be said for the way this game, you know, it's an open world, but it just has so. many things to do and as you guys talked about like you can create your own fun you can basically

define your own parameters to compete with friends or whatever you know i did that too with trying to drive within the traffic rules um it's just a remarkable creation you know there was so much more complex and open and nuanced than than we really expected to see from console games at that point. It had, you know, the substance you would have seen in maybe a large PC-R-P-G, but a console action game? No, no way. Well, I feel like we've almost said everything we have to say about Grants of Toto 3. Is there anything else people want to add or check in at this point?

Yeah, I think like... There is a remake on the horizon. Is that true? Like a... Not just a port, but like a full remake, or is it just a rumor? I've heard rumor. I have not heard confirmation yet. Yeah, I haven't heard...

I haven't heard a confirmation. It feels like it'd be very strange to remake this game because I feel like... Like, you really miss going back to the things they improved upon. And it does feel like it's very much of its time. And I recommend trying it on a modern platform just for the nostalgia trip because there's a lot of things that will annoy you. But going back 20 years, you'll be surprised how ahead of its time it really was. And, yeah, it's hard to believe it's been 20 years.

But, again, it did set down the rules of the open world. And like some of my favorite games, like the Yoxa series and Deadly Permanition and things like that, they couldn't really exist without this framework being established 20 years ago. You know, we brush past it just because of time concerns, but I think we should also mention the fact that the cast for this game is really impressive, you know, considering the time, considering the era, you know, obviously these are not like, you know, box office draws, but the fact is most of the voices you hear in this game from, you know, from the characters who give you missions, they're very recognizable. And I think that was probably a shift. I think

As the series got on, of course, you know, the more profile, the higher profile this game got, the more high profile stars they got. And, you know, the very next game stars Ray Leota. But even the sort of, you know, quote unquote, B-list actors they have for here, they're still recognizable B-list actors. And I think that was a big thing for future games sort of getting actors and, like, known actors involved in video games, you know, prior to this, you know, you had the whole Bruce Willis and, you know, apocalypse on PlayStation thing, which is like, that's, that's so quaint now compared to games that actually have, you know, celebrity, you know, Yeah, looking over your notes, I was kind of surprised by some of the names in here, like Kyle McLaughlin. I guess he wasn't really, he didn't really have much going on when this game came out. So, you know, they could put him in as a Donald Trump analog. But now, you know, his star is much shinier as he's kind of had a career revitalization through the new Twin Peaks and so forth. So, yeah, it's interesting to see kind of, who shows up and where they were in their career at that point. Yeah, looking over the cast list, I can see it was not just 9-11 that possibly made this game so big.

It was also the Sopranos because, you know, technically started in 1999. But by 2001, it was one of the most talked about shows on TV. It was the breaking bad of its time, definitely. So people's interest in crime was definitely skyrocketing, especially mafia-related stuff. We didn't even have true crime podcasts at that point. Just imagine. We didn't have podcasts. Oh, wow.

We had to read books about murder. Oh, my God. So, if that's all the stuff we have to say, I know it's getting late for you, Jeremy. Perhaps we should just wrap things up. This has been Retronauts. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you being here. If you are listening to the free feed, thank you so much.

We hope you enjoy our show. We have a new episode for you every Monday. However, if you visit us on Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts, if you give us $3 a month, you can get each episode a week early. and it's a better quality, a better audio quality episode. If you give us $5 a month, however, you get two bonus episodes on two alternating Fridays each month. You get weekly columns from me, and I also have a little audio podcast that goes with the column. I read the column to you, if you're not into that sort of thing.

And, of course, we have a Discord now. You can access our Discord. I'm in the Discord. Jeremy, Bob, are both in Discord. You know, we're in there talking about whatever you talk about in Discord. I can see what you say about me. I'm watching. I'm taking notes. Jeremy, what about your exciting side projects? I'm nothing but side projects. It's side projects all the way down. You know, so I do the media coordination curation thing at Limited Run Games. You will find my name on things there, sometimes in games that you

purchase. It's very exciting. You can find me on this podcast called Retronauts. Check it out sometime. It's pretty good, Retronauts.com. And then, of course, I have my video series, a weekly video chronology of classic games going all the way back at some point to the epoch cassette vision in Japan. Wow, that's some deep cuts. Anyway, I'm all about the deep cuts, but that's not what people go for. They go for the Metal Gear videos, and I do those too. So you can check that out on YouTube.

Just look for my name, Parrish, P-A-R-I-S-H. That's right. Only one R. It's tricked you there. Yeah. So I recommend all those things. They're very good. Bob. Oh, yes. I do a lot of other things on the side, especially podcasts. If you like podcasts, you like hearing my voice. I have two other podcasts. They are Talking Simpsons, the Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons. And also, what a cartoon. We look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Sign up there for a ton of bonus stuff. We've been doing a limited miniseries for over four. four years now, so there's over 100 bonus episodes there. And very soon, we're starting a blabbing about Batman the animated series. It's going to be our Batman the animated series miniseries, and we're going to be looking over the 10 of our favorite episodes of that series, only on the Patreon, only at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

And also, I'm on Twitter as at Bob Serbo. Follow me there as well. I'm rubbing my hands together at that Batman series, Bob. Ooh, I can't wait to start recording it. Yes. Speaking personally, you can find me on Twitter or Twitch as Fight Club, F-E-I-T. That's my last name. C-L-U-B. That's a noun you're familiar with. It's a little joke I've made for almost 20 years now. Streaming-wise, I tend to

stream retro games because this is Retronauts. I just recently completed a playthrough of a new version of a game called Mist. And Jeremy, your Twitter, you did you mention Twitter? I did not. It's GameSpite. Okay. I have a question. You know, you mentioned fighting. Club. How much do you think that film fed into the popularity of GTA3? Interesting. I don't think there are any references in the game, are there? No,

I don't think there are. It's probably too close for release-wise. No, no. That was a 99 movie, so they were probably... Right, right. No, I'm not saying like, fed into the content of the game. I'm saying fed into the popularity, the reception of it. I feel like in some ways GTA3

was kind of the first opportunity. people had to sort of take the pervasive, you know, anarchic philosophy espoused in the movie fight club and kind of explore those things, you know, in sort of a safe, you know, no actual crimes committed kind of environment. I don't know. Maybe I just pulled that out of thin air and it means nothing, but it just, I feel like there was, there was something in the air at that point. Cloud kind of looks like Tyler Durden. There you go. You can pretend. And you can use mods on the PC version to make them look like Tyler Durdon. Or Meeleaf.

I mean, you could definitely simulate some of those project mayhem missions in the Grant the Thought of 3 world. So you could probably, you could probably pull it off. The fighting is not the great, though. No, no. That's true. I would not found a club around the fighting in Grand The Thought O'3. All right.

I guess that's it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. Good night, everybody. You're going to live on to be able to be able to see. Oh, ah, oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Thank you.