It’s only now, a decade on from the release of Grand Theft Auto 3, that we can truly define what a landmark the game is. The unlikely revolutionary, GTA3 was preceded by a few top-down originals that bore much of the game’s attitude, but none of its technology or flair. Ten years later, Grand Theft Auto as a franchise can still be considered the hallmark of modern gaming; a symbol of the hardcore gamer market that affects players in a more meaningful way than even Call of Duty.
The open-world game has become this generation’s most prominent single-player production. Prototype, inFamous, Red Dead Redempton, LA Noire, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Batman Arkham City, Red Faction Guerrilla, Crysis, Dark Souls, Just Cause, Mafia, Deadly Premonition, all games that in varying ways can point to GTA3 for popularizing their given genre, for leading to their very production.
Before going any further, it’s best to first determine what we’re talking about here. Traditionally, games were formulated as linear journeys through custom-crafted stages. For reference, think of a Mario level. Even 3D games such as Super Mario 64 consisted of these custom stages, each new level a separate entity from the space that came before it. Architectural design was geared entirely towards the player, in giving the player some sort of challenge to overcome.
Grand Theft Auto 3's nameless protagonist
In comparison, an open world game consists of a single cohesive environment, which is designed separate from any contrived notion of challenge. ‘Levels’, such as they are, take place entirely in the same, consistent space. Progress through an open world game is generally guided by the will of the player; if all you want to do is run around and explore the world, you’re absolutely free to do so.
As Mario, your only real option is to run forward until you hit that flag. Open-world games revel in their space, though, allowing players the freedom to come and go as they choose. These games are generally littered with side-missions – smaller quests which exist purely for the player to spend more time in the world and potentially build their stats.
GTA3 takes place entirely within the faux-New York setting of Liberty City. It contains three islands and barring some plot-progression contrivances, players are free to roam wherever they like. If you’d like to pursue story missions, you can. If you’d like instead – as so many players chose – to have sex with prostitutes and then run them over so as to collect their money, you can. Aside from the plot barring access to the second two islands, the whole world felt stitched together in a manner that was logical and within real-world reasoning. Entering a taxi allowed the player to undertake side missions as a cab driver, likewise for police cars (which allowed you to hunt down criminals), ambulances (which acted like the taxi missions, passengers swapped for patients), fire trucks and so on.
The sprawling game world of Liberty City, which was included with the game as an actual foldout map
Other games had offered open worlds before, but the true success here was in the way GTA3 married that open-world conceit to a believable, three dimensional space. Liberty City is a pale imitation of New York, but it worked against the hardware limitations of the time to provide a compelling copy, right down to the ability to take the subway around town. Previous GTA games attempted similar acts, but their limited technology proved their undoing. For once, you could stand on the street level of the city and watch as pedestrians walked by, cars drove about, the world living its own life regardless of your presence.
After playing GTA3, character-based actions games and third-person adventures suddenly seemed stale and archaic. The third-person action game in particular was the mainstay single-player genre of the previous console generation and has now taken a backseat, its best features incorporated into open-world designs. Modern open-world games therefore leverage the best of both worlds, merging linear quests with open-world exploration. Anyone who has played Assassin’s Creed can attest to this.
Assassin's Creed, a game which owes much to Grand Theft Auto
It’s also easy to forget that the main character of the game was not blessed with a name. He didn’t even have any lines of dialog. His actions, then, were your actions. The design prerogative here – one perhaps taken from development house Valve – is that once the character opens his mouth, he’s no longer yours. Because of this, everyone who played the game was apt to feel a pang of personal investment in it. That guy on-screen was a cypher, and you were the one in that city. He didn’t talk, but his actions, your actions, spoke for him.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that GTA3’s subject matter was ripe for controversy. The series continued on with several other releases over the years, with Grand Theft Auto 4 and it’s expansion Episodes from Liberty City being the most recent, but none of them have had the cumulative effect of three. Even the content of recent games hasn’t managed to generate the same furor on Fox News, which is probably a good thing. It’s possible to over-credit this foul content for leading to much of the game’s success, but I don’t feel like that detracts from its legacy. It was trashy, sure, but it was also conceptually dense and light years beyond the triple-A games that saw release in the same period. Only Halo can be credited with causing as much of a shift in the game development world, something that I’ll look at in a future column.
There is no doubt that another ten years from now, when the merging of genres has blended open-world, third-person, first-person, single-player and multiplayer, GTA3 will still be looked at as the first game to bring about popularity for this foundational structure. It respected and nurtured player freedom, without sacrificing pacing and momentum. It offered limitless opportunities, and yet still managed to drive you through an entertaining and meaningful plot.
In short, it did what the best games do; it used a combination of high-concept design and powerful technology to provide you with the convincing illusion of choice. It succeeded by making you not matter, driving you to make yourself the city’s most colourful inhabitant by imposing your own decisions upon it. Now there was an achievement.
Sophisticated Pulp 
What an article !