Dan Houser told the British TV show Sunday Brunch that when Rockstar was finishing Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001 the studio felt they were onto something special even though the wider world did not share that feeling until the game shipped. Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020 and was a writer on GTA 3, 4, and 5, said that the team thought “this could be amazing. There’s something really magical about this” as the project came together. He added that as the game started to “come together, it had these moments of real innovation and [it] felt like the future, in a way.”
That optimism stood in contrast to the lack of external buzz. “Until it came out, no one outside of our company was very excited by it,” Houser said, noting that GTA 3 arrived just after 9/11 in late 2001 and that public interest grew rapidly after launch. GTA 3 is often treated now as the turning point that made open world action games feel inevitable. Houser’s recollection is a reminder that internal belief and public excitement do not always line up, and sometimes studios are the only people who can see the long shot.
This is not the only time Houser has talked about rocky development and narrow misses. We previously covered his comments about Red Dead Redemption 2 nearly failing after budget and schedule problems, which casts these GTA 3 remarks in a wider pattern of projects that felt fragile while they were being built. GTA 3’s story is a small case study in betting on creative risk when few outside the studio are convinced. The title ended up changing expectations for the series and for open-world design broadly, and Houser’s memory underlines how unpredictable that moment was inside the company.
X, Bluesky, YouTube welcome comments and thoughts on this topic, and readers are invited to follow those channels for more conversation.
Grand Theft Auto III
Developed by DMA Design, TransGaming Inc.
Featuring a fully 3-D living city, a combination of narrative driven and non-linear gameplay and a completely open environment, Grand Theft Auto III represents a huge leap forward in interactive entertainment. For the first time, players are put at the heart of their very own gangster movie, and let loose in a fully-realised 3 dimensional city, in which anything can happen and probably will.
With a cast of hundreds, 50 plus vehicles, ranging from sports cars to ice cream trucks and from boats to buses, 3 hours of music, including opera, reggae, house, drum and bass, pop and disco, a huge array of street ready weapons and some of the seediest characters in video game history, Grand Theft Auto 3 is a sprawling epic which will show you that sometimes, crime can pay and sometimes it can pay you back. Available now for PlayStation2, Xbox, PC and Macintosh.
- Genre: Shooter, Racing, Simulator, Adventure
- Platforms: Xbox, PlayStation 4, Android, PC (Microsoft Windows), iOS, Mac, PlayStation 2
- Modes: Single player
- Release: 2001-10-22
- Publisher: Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Games, Capcom, ak tronic, 1C-SoftClub
-
Age Rating:
CLASS_IND 18 / ACB R 18+ / GRAC 19+ / USK 18 / PEGI 18 / CERO Z / ESRB M
- IGDB Rating: 84.7/100
