Crime of the century

20 years on, GTA III's art director, Aaron Garbut, talks to Jeremy Peel about the game's landmark creation

- Jeremy Peel

Dreamcast is rarely thought of as the start of anything. It was the full stop on Sega’s reign as a hardware company, the console that died as PlayStation 2 thrived. But it was also, Rockstar says, the birthplace of the era’s defining PlayStation game. You know, the one your mum heard was about killing prostitutes: Grand Theft Auto III.

The story goes like this: GTA’s developer, DMA Design, had just opened a new office in Edinburgh after a decade in Dundee. Change crackled in the air. The ’90s were ending, and all around DMA the game industry was transitioning to three dimensions. The young team behind an early 3D game named Body Harvest believed they were ready to do the same with GTA.

Yet the studio’s old guard was unconvinced. The team had already experimented with tilting the camera a little in GTA 2, but weren’t sure it was possible to go further. A simulated city, navigated at breakneck speeds in whatever direction the player chose? Surely not in 3D.

“We had a bit of pushback from them,” recalls Rockstar North co-studio head and art director Aaron Garbut. “So we did a tech demo of a city environment on the Dreamcast with cars driving around and characters walking the streets. We got it working over a period of weeks to the point where you could steal a car and drive it about, then we got it in front of Sam.”

Sam Houser was the executive producer of Take-Two’s new publishing label in New York, which had rather audaciously named itself Rockstar Games. He’d been a backer of GTA since its earliest days, egging its team on as they embraced player criminality and transgression. Now he was more than keen for the series to take its next revolutionary step.