“Mine’s bigger” – Grand Theft Auto III

**Grand Theft Auto III** (DMA Design/Rockstar, PlayStation 2, 2001)

I’d never played Grand Theft Auto III before now, but I knew by reputation that the radio stations in it were meant to be good. I was ready for it. I just didn’t expect them to be so good. I didn’t expect that, for all the game’s influence and the way that so much of it would turn out to seem utterly familiar to me despite having never played it or its successors, the radio stations would still sound so fresh and pointed today.

It helps that Grand Theft Auto III is fundamentally, much more fundamentally than the original game, about America as seen through a screen and from the other side of the Atlantic. In my own real life visits to the US, being driven around and listening to the radio is one of the ways that I’ve got a feeling for it, for culture confident and alien and familiar. The fact of being in cars so much was different from my life at home, and the radio is inexorably linked to the car. American radio formats are their own world, with their own music.

I had never heard of any of the songs in Grand Theft Auto III, but if anything it helps keep it more timeless, and they pass muster as adjacent to pop music. They could have been parody songs, but even the ones seemingly chosen partly for their lack of individual identity have radio suitability ahead of cheap point-scoring. Some feel like in another universe they could have been the Owl City song that once went from local curiosity while I was in California to British #1 a few months later.

It’s in the nature of radio that even when listening to it alone, its audience, implied or referenced or calling in to talk about their problems, listening right now alongside you, means there is always a sense of being plugged into both a moment and a wider place and its people. There are a lot of things that DMA Design painstakingly put into Grand Theft Auto III to make its Liberty City feel more like a real place. The people going about their business, the changing weather, the range of things to do, the sheer breathtaking scale of it all, all play their part. The radio, though, feels like the strongest connection into a place of all, even as its adverts for animal-testing-monkey platformer games and world-destroying SUVs (the latter voiced by their brashly entitled owners) are also its best satire of the world that place sits within. Every car journey offers another piece of Liberty City, and when it gets to the point of instantly flicking away from Lips 106 on hearing “Forever” yet again, that’s a pretty realistic radio experience too.

DMA Design and Rockstar got professional DJs to voice the shows and made it sound impressively good; some of the bits where DJs cut into the end of songs to make banal jokes by stages sound almost too perfect. As Dan Houser, one of the game’s producers and writers, put it to IGN at the time: “the end result is radio that sounds very right until you listen to the words, and then it sounds very wrong. This was the effect we wanted to create: high production values and absurd content.” And yes, it made me laugh at just that effect, not only with the satire of consumerism but some of the more straightforwardly juvenile bits, like the admonition to check out Sex Club 7 (ah, so that’s what the S stands for).

Plenty of later games, it turns out, learnt entirely the wrong lessons from this part of Grand Theft Auto III. As best, they learnt that having a selection of in-game radio stations was cool, and made worse ones. More often, they learnt that you could get celebrated for playing pre-recorded audio to the player while they did other gameplay things, and turned to collectible audio logs or bad voiceovers.

There is also a game outside of getting in cars and driving around in the rain listening to the radio. Well, there doesn’t have to be, which is kind of the point. Many tastes are catered for. The first few missions feel a little like once again playing (obvious inspiration) Driver, but they slowly expand outwards. If you want to do missions, you are frequently going to be carrying out death and destruction, but within that boundary you get an impressive amount of choice , carried through from the original game even as all of the detail and realism goes up. Sure, you might get given grenades to blow up some vans, but you can just steal them and crash them instead if you wish. Being provided with a gun is no reason not to ram your enemy’s own car into them. Safer and more fun! Grand Theft Auto III put together that kind of choice with its expansive world so powerfully that it, its freedom, and its map with different mission options, kicked off the growth of a whole genre.

Through those missions, you get a story, too. You could argue that the story is based on the same philosophy as the radio. High production values and absurd content. But it doesn’t stand up in the same way. Compared to Grand Theft Auto, it has a lot more to it, going well beyond that game’s story as a means for crass (racist, sexist…) humour and for pointing you from A and B to do your points-gathering. Grand Theft Auto III retains plenty of humour and a moderate level of crassness, but it also has an actual plot and characters.

Kenji Kasen and Asuka Kasen are certainly an enormous move forward from the likes of Hung Well and Chu Wing Dung, though not going for route one racism is not something anyone should ever have expected credit for. However, they and the blank space of a protagonist sit in a mediocre gangster movie with just enough of a sheen of humour to provide an excuse that it’s not trying to be more, even if the excuse doesn’t have to cover as many sins as it once did. Missions like giving lifts to sex workers to a police event have aspirations to satire, but it’s pretty surface level and still leaning on the idea of sex workers being inherently funny and/or titillating. When it comes to story, unlike the world, the content isn’t absurd enough, and the production values aren’t high enough.