GTA III at 25: the game that built the open world GTA 6 still lives in

Twenty-five years ago this month, on October 22, 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on PlayStation 2 and invented the kind of game Grand Theft Auto VI is. Two entries earlier the series had been a top-down sprite game. III handed players a three-dimensional Liberty City with no loading screens between streets, and every open-world game since has followed its template. The full page is on the Classics section; this is why it matters on the road to Leonida.

A city you could just drive into

The idea sounds obvious now: take a job, ignore it, cause chaos, come back later, and the story waits. In 2001 it was new. Liberty City's three islands opened up as the story progressed, pedestrians reacted, fought back, fled and commented, and the chase camera and driving model were good enough to carry an entire game. The phrase "GTA clone" became a category because of this disc; Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs and Watch Dogs all trace back to it.

The silent man and the mob roster

Claude, the protagonist, never speaks. Left for dead by his girlfriend Catalina during a bank robbery, he claws his way from a crashed prison van to the top of the underworld, working for the Leone family, then their rivals, then whoever pays. The casting told everyone Rockstar took its crime fiction seriously: Frank Vincent as Salvatore Leone, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Madsen, Robert Loggia, Michael Rapaport, Debi Mazar and Kyle MacLachlan. It also shipped under a new name: DMA Design, the Dundee studio behind Lemmings, became Rockstar North.

Radio as world-building

Nine stations with DJs, adverts and phone-ins. Chatterbox FM, with Lazlow, turned the car stereo into comedy writing rather than background noise, and the radio has been the series' signature ever since; Leonida's six revealed stations are the latest descendants.

Six stars

III's wanted level ran to six stars, escalating from beat cops to roadblocks to the army. Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV kept six; GTA V dropped to five; GTA 6 brings the sixth star back, with a police system that is more deliberate than III's but built on the same escalation curve. Our wanted level guide has the modern version.

The controversy, and the afterlife

Banned outright in Brazil, condemned in parliaments and pulled into every media-violence debate of its decade, none of which hurt sales. It was remastered in the 2021 Definitive Edition trilogy, famously rough at launch and patched steadily since, and Liberty City itself was rebuilt from scratch for GTA IV. Next in the line: Vice City.

Every game in order on the Classics page