“ GTA III helped clarify our approach to making games, and it’s something that has stuck with us in every game we make, from GTA III through to GTA V, the Red Dead Redemption series and everything else: we are focused on building worlds – and on making these worlds as believable, detailed, interesting, varied and alive as possible,” says Garbut. Other than Shenmue, there was little to no precedent for the mechanics required to make an open world game function - let alone make it fun to play or, hell, even marketable. Unfortunately, it never saw a return on the investment, as players struggled to understand its subtler, intimate appeal. At the time, S henmue was the most expensive game ever produced. The shift into 3D meant we had to reconsider how all these disparate parts would come together since players were ‘in’ the world now, not just looking down upon it.”īefore GTA III, there had been Shenmue, a before-its-time title from Sega that saw critical acclaim for its innovative, if unpolished, attempt at building a realistic 3D town for players to interact with. “Some of these elements were there in 2D games, but the distance and the top-down perspective allowed them for them to be far simpler. We wanted to give the world height and to play with that height,” says Aaron Garbut, offering insights on his time as Art Director for the Grand Theft Auto series. We wanted to ground players in the experience, triggering missions in person, talking to people from where they lived and worked.

“To do the kinds of things we wanted to do, we needed a physics engine that would give us more connection of the vehicles to the world and the objects within it. How did Rockstar Games even set about developing it? How could they create a realistic world - an entire city - from scratch?

Development of the title began shortly after the release of Super Mario 64, a technical marvel for its time. With titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Red Dead Redemption 2, it seems like the open world genre has reached a point of near saturation - taking us from the bottom of the sea to the depths of deep space.īut there was a time 20 years ago, before selling 14.5 million copies, winning nearly every Game of the Year, and launching its franchise into the stratosphere, when GTA III was an enormous risk for a studio to take. Today is 20th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III, one of the most innovative and beloved games in history.īefore its rerelease within Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition on consoles, mobile, and PC later this year, we’ve been thinking about the state of open world games since these titles first hit the scene two decades ago.

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