Over the next few months, I’m going to be taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t come with any new IGN score, but they will re-examine what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release. By the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly rank in my long-term love for this series.
Today, we go back to the game that changed this series forever: Grand Theft Auto III.
Playing Grand Theft Auto III in 2026 is a little like watching a home movie of Usain Bolt learning to walk. It’s a little wobbly, and it hasn’t quite got the whole process worked out yet, but through a modern lens it comes with a fascinating awareness you’re seeing the first steps of a field-defining juggernaut. In the late ’90s, GTA games had found success showing us the unique brand of freedom they offered within their sandbox-style cities – but the old school, top-down approach was a dated aesthetic in contrast to the fully 3D worlds that were first beginning to emerge during this era. In 2001, GTA III arrived as a completely different proposition, instantly reinventing the series as the new cutting edge of open-world action games.
It’s true that its already annoying targeting system is doubly frustrating by modern standards, and its time-consuming mission restarts do feel particularly punitive 25 years on. However, I’ve found it impossible not to admire how well it otherwise weaves together its driving, action, story, and exploration within a dynamic 3D world, considering it accomplished this before there was any sort of proper blueprint for doing so. Sure, GTA III didn’t get everything right immediately – but you’ve got to walk before you can run.
Playing GTA III in such close proximity to GTA 2, I’m actually quickly reminded of how immediately the former feels like the game that was actually teased by the latter’s eye-catching, live-action intro. The gritty, New York-based short promotional film Rockstar produced for GTA 2 (and subsequently trimmed down to serve as its intro) never felt remotely connected to the quasi-cyberpunk setting of that game – but it feels perfectly aligned to GTA III. The fact that GTA III made good on a cheque that GTA 2 bounced made it all the more special upon its arrival. GTA 2 only left me desperately wanting a game in the spirit of what I saw in that promo film. Two years later, GTA III delivered it.
GTA III kept a couple of noticeable elements established by its predecessor – like its hilarious array of custom radio commercials, its random fascination with Elvis Presley, and even an optional top-down camera – but it completely discarded its divisive time period, indeterminable location, and retro-futuristic fleet of vehicles. Instead, it opted for something credible, contemporary, and recognisable, and returned to the original GTA’s New York homage: Liberty City.
It’s a Bent World
While GTA III’s voice cast is a murderers’ row of iconic Hollywood crime fiction actors – including Frank Vincent, Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano, Robert Loggia, Michael Rapaport, Kyle MacLachlan, and Debi Mazar – none gallops away as the star of the game. In fact, with a silent protagonist and an otherwise very simple story propped up by a supporting crew of broad and largely one-dimensional criminal stereotypes, it’s Liberty City itself that perhaps emerges as GTA III’s greatest character.
Liberty City is split into three distinct boroughs that are rationed out as the story unfolds. We begin in Portland, an area defined by its grimy industrial sector and seedy red light district, before scampering to the Manhattan-inspired Staunton Island when the situation turns sour. Staunton Island is a wholly different backdrop; it’s highly commercial and features towering skyscrapers and a lush and centrally located park. The third area is Shoreside Vale, which is a leafy, suburban zone that’s otherwise dominated by a large airport and dam. Unfortunately, Shoreside Vale is actually the least interesting of the three boroughs, lacking both the personality of Portland and the density of Staunton Island. I’ll give it a nod for being the home of the infamously tricky to fly Dodo, but it’s otherwise a bit of a disappointing shift.
The dimensions of Liberty City are extremely modest compared to its later reinvention in GTA IV – and it’s absolutely dwarfed by modern open-world standards – but that was of no consequence back in 2001. At that time, it was unlike any game world we’d ever visited – and its nature as a place where day became night and clear weather turned to rain made it somewhere that felt alive in a fundamentally new way. Stand still in GTA III’s Liberty City and life will simply go on around you. Traffic flows, pedestrians pass, and the Earth spins. None of this would be particularly impressive today, but it was back then. The feeling I got re-immersing myself in GTA III and being transported back to that moment in my life has been a potent one.
You Better Drive, Brother
The template DMA Design established for the top-down GTA games unsurprisingly remained in place for GTA III. That is, whether you’re behind the wheel or on foot, everything happens in the same space. There are no “driving” levels or “action” levels. There are no levels at all. There’s one map, and player agency is the number one priority. Yes, there are many instances where the missions may compel you to use a particular vehicle but, for the most part, you’re in complete control of how you move around the world. Grab whatever car you want, and head in any direction you choose.
25 years on, the novelty of this freedom has somewhat expired – but in 2001 it was really nothing short of revolutionary. The powerful might of the PlayStation 2 had given GTA III the ability to push far beyond what was possible on the original PlayStation, transforming its top-down chaos into something modern, immediate, dangerous, and cinematic. Very simply, you were now in the world – not floating above it. It no longer felt like playing cops and robbers with toy cars – it felt like holidaying in a Michael Mann action sequence.
GTA III’s driving physics are a little slippier and floatier than they are in the more modern installments of the series, but they’re still quite easy to come to terms with in 2026. They don’t quite have the weight and inertia needed to be able to consistently flick them into extravagant J-turns and the like, but they feel otherwise adequate. There are many open-world action/driving games released over the last 25 years that I’ve found twitchier, sloppier, or more superficial than GTA III, that much I can assure you. At any rate, being behind the wheel is also the only way to hear all the wacky radio commercials, which once again had me grinning – or the cavalcade of insane callers on Chatterbox FM.
What has aged quite horribly, however, is the third-person shooting – which was arguably already the weakest pillar of GTA III back in 2001 (at least on PS2, which didn’t have the benefit of the 2002 PC version’s mouse functionality). The main issue is that not all of the weapons support free aim. Only the M16-style assault rifle, rocket launcher, and sniper rifle can be manually aimed; everything else must rely on the auto-lock targeting system. This doesn’t sound like a huge sacrifice, until you find yourself in a significant firefight on the streets of Liberty City, and you end up inadvertently cycling your reticule onto nearby grandmas, allies, or overzealous paramedics because the system doesn’t prioritise the armed assailants blasting at you.
The complete lack of mission checkpoints wouldn’t really pass muster today, either. It certainly reduces the amount of chaos I’m willing to get into, considering it’s a more efficient use of time to try to pick off enemies from as far away as possible and lean on any cheesy strategy that works. The need to continuously drive all the way back to mission start bubbles after failing an objective was already a pretty aggravating chore in 2001, but it was softened by the fact I was just a university student living at home, with a part-time job and oodles of free time. In 2026, I’m all out of oodles.
I Want Compensation for this Insult!
Despite generating widespread controversy (and, quite possibly, thanks to it) GTA III was monumentally successful, greatly exceeding sales expectations. It ultimately sold more than 14.5 million copies, 11.6 million of which were on PS2 – where it would become the fifth highest-selling game on the system. However, while its commercial impact is one thing, its cultural impact is something else altogether.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the immense legacy of GTA III is to look at everything that came after it. That is, everything that ultimately paraphrased the modern open-world philosophy that GTA III essentially established – a large, explorable environment with missions distributed throughout it, optional side activities, a varied fleet of vehicles, endless NPCs, believable radio stations and music, and the freedom to poke the world and see how hard it pokes back. Yes, GTA III owes its own reverence to the projects that inspired it in the first place, with Rockstar’s Sam Houser memorably explaining it as Zelda meets Goodfellas at the time, but there is no denying the influence of the template it established. True Crime, Saints Row, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs; each of them borrowed or riffed on concepts GTA III created.
It’s hard to say what the open-world action/driving genre looks like were it not for GTA III. Does it still evolve at all? Absolutely. As I discussed in our GTA 2 Legacy Review, the dawn of 3D driving games was already upon us at that time – and several had already begun to blend third-person action into them. The genre was already here, albeit in its infancy. Driver 3 was always going to be an evolution of the ambitious Driver 2. Mafia had been in development since late 1998. The Getaway had been in development for the original PlayStation before becoming a PS2 project. We certainly can’t pretend things weren’t happening in this space.
However, we also can’t pretend that any of these early examples accomplished what GTA III did with nearly the same aplomb. We can’t pretend they contained the same unhinged energy, or the same innovative blend of driving, action, story, and exploration. There, GTA III stands alone. Its immense success didn’t happen by accident; it happened because it uncovered and established a formula that gamers found irresistible – and the series has been the yardstick for the genre for 25 years because of it.
Verdict
Grand Theft Auto III, in its original form, is a frustrating and regularly cumbersome game to play in 2026. Its unforgiving need to manually return to mission markers and start from scratch encourages a very careful and conservative sort of playstyle that clashes with the chaotic level of freedom its world and systems otherwise encourage. On top of this, its shooting is admittedly fussy and frustrating, and its cast of shallow and simplistic characters are amongst the least memorable of the series. Within that initial salvo of 3D GTA games, Vice City oozed dramatically more style and swagger, and San Andreas offered astonishingly increased size and scope. However, neither of these legendary games can lay claim to being GTA III – just improved versions of it.
It occupies a unique place in the series’ storied history. While it didn’t pioneer every part of the modern formula for open-world games, it brought driving, action, story, and exploration together in a radically new way. It didn’t just change the trajectory of the GTA series forever – it changed the business. There are few games that can claim to be as innovative as GTA III, and fewer still as permanently trendsetting. GTA III didn’t just show us what an open world game was. It showed us what an open world game could be.
For more reflections on the incredible Grand Theft Auto series, you can read our new Legacy Reviews of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2, with more to follow over the coming months.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
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