Grand Theft Auto III

Grand Theft Auto III is the 2001 open-world crime game from DMA Design that moved the series into 3D and built the template every later GTA still follows. You play Claude, a silent thief working his way through the gangs of Liberty City after a betrayal leaves him for dead. This entry covers the story, the map, the versions and where you can actually play it now.

The story

Claude and his girlfriend Catalina rob a bank in Liberty City. She shoots him during the getaway, takes the money and leaves him to the police. He draws a ten-year sentence. On the drive to prison, the Colombian Cartel ambushes the convoy to free a different prisoner, and Claude slips away in the chaos with a bomb maker called 8-Ball.

From there you climb. Claude starts running errands for the Leone crime family in Portland, then moves across the river to work for the Yakuza, a dirty cop and a media mogul. Every employer uses you, and most of them get burned for it. The thread running through all of it is Catalina, who has become a Cartel boss and is pushing a new drug called SPANK into the city.

The game never gives Claude a line of dialogue. He nods, he shrugs, he shoots. The writing does its work through the people who hire him, and most of them are played by recognisable film actors.

In Portland, Luigi Goterelli sets Claude up with small jobs before passing him to Joey Leone, then Toni Cipriani, then the Don himself, Salvatore Leone. Salvatore’s wife Maria takes a liking to Claude, and Salvatore notices. After Claude blows up a Cartel ship in “Bomb Da Base: Act II”, Salvatore rewards him with a car rigged to explode. Maria warns him in time and the two of them flee to Staunton Island with her friend Asuka Kasen, a Yakuza boss.

Asuka wants proof of loyalty, so Claude kills Salvatore in “Sayonara Salvatore”. That opens Staunton Island. There he takes work from Asuka, her brother Kenji, the corrupt detective Ray Machowski and the media tycoon Donald Love. Love wants a gang war to drive down property prices, so he has Claude murder Kenji while dressed as a Cartel soldier in “Waka-Gashira Wipeout!”. Love also has Claude free the “Old Oriental Gentleman”, the very prisoner the Cartel broke out at the start. Then Love vanishes.

Ray’s situation collapses too. Internal Affairs closes in and you fly him out of the city in “Marked Man”, a mission that hands you his bulletproof Patriot. Asuka, meanwhile, blames the Cartel for Kenji’s death and tortures their lieutenant Miguel for information. Catalina responds by killing them both and kidnapping Maria.

The final mission is “The Exchange”. Claude delivers a ransom at the Cartel mansion in Cedar Grove, gets double-crossed, fights through the grounds and shoots down Catalina’s helicopter with a rocket launcher at the dam. Maria is rescued. Over the end credits she talks without pause until a single gunshot cuts her off. Rockstar has never clarified what that shot means, and the ambiguity is the point.

The city and map

Liberty City is three islands joined by bridges and a tunnel. You unlock them in order, and the unlocks are tied to story progress rather than exploration.

Island	Based on	Unlocked by	Key locations
Portland	Brooklyn and Queens, with a Little Italy and Chinatown	Open from the start	Luigi’s Sex Club 7, Joey’s garage, Salvatore’s mansion at Saint Mark’s, 8-Ball’s bomb shop, the Portland Harbor docks
Staunton Island	Manhattan	Completing “Last Requests” for Salvatore	Kenji’s casino, Love Media tower, the Liberty City Stadium, Belleville Park, the police HQ where Ray meets you in the toilets
Shoreside Vale	New Jersey and the Bronx suburbs	Completing “A Drop in the Ocean” for Donald Love	Francis International Airport, the Cochrane Dam, Wichita Gardens projects, Cedar Grove mansions

The Callahan Bridge connects Portland and Staunton. It is damaged in the opening cutscene and stays closed until the story reopens it, which is the oldest “locked island” trick in the series. The Porter Tunnel and the Shoreside Lift Bridge handle the rest.

The map is small by modern standards. You can drive from one end to the other in a couple of minutes. What it lacks in size it makes up in density. Each island has its own gangs, its own radio reception quirks and its own weather patterns. Fog rolls off the river and swallows Staunton’s towers. Rain makes every road a skating rink.

Three design rules shaped how Liberty City plays:

• No swimming. Claude drowns the instant he touches water. Every chase near the docks carries a real penalty.
• No in-game map screen. You get a radar and the paper map that shipped in the box. The Definitive Edition adds a full pause-menu map.
• No flyable helicopters. The Dodo is the only aircraft, and its clipped wings make sustained flight a cult skill rather than a feature.

Collectibles are spread across all three islands: 100 hidden packages, 20 unique stunt jumps and 20 rampages. Every ten packages earns a weapon spawn at your safehouse. If you want to see how far the series has travelled, compare this three-island layout with the “gta 6 map” and the state of Leonida Rockstar has shown so far.

Characters

GTA III’s cast is the first time Rockstar leaned on film and television actors, and the voice work still holds up.

Claude. The protagonist. He never speaks, has no backstory beyond the bank job, and is only named in GTA San Andreas, where he shows up in 1992 as Catalina’s new boyfriend during a street race.

Catalina. Voiced by Cynthia Farrell. Claude’s ex-partner, a Cartel leader by the midpoint of the game, and the series’ first properly vindictive antagonist.

Salvatore Leone. Frank Vincent, of Goodfellas and Casino. The Leone Don who runs Portland’s organised crime and later features in Liberty City Stories and San Andreas.

Toni Cipriani. Michael Madsen. Salvatore’s capo, who lives with his mother above a restaurant in Saint Mark’s. He becomes the playable lead in Liberty City Stories, where a different actor voices him.

Joey Leone. Michael Rapaport. Salvatore’s son, who runs a chop shop and hands out your first real driving missions.

Luigi Goterelli. Joe Pantoliano. The nightclub owner who gives you your first jobs and keeps you busy protecting his girls.

Maria Latore. Debi Mazar. Salvatore’s wife, Claude’s reason for leaving Portland, and the voice over the final credits.

Asuka and Kenji Kasen. Liana Pai and Les Mau. Yakuza siblings who control Staunton Island’s rackets.

Ray Machowski. Robert Loggia. A detective on the take who hides from Internal Affairs in a public bathroom.

Donald Love. Kyle MacLachlan. The Love Media owner whose schemes shape the back half of the game. He returns in Liberty City Stories.

8-Ball. Voiced by Guru of Gang Starr. The demolitions expert who escapes with you and rigs the explosives for the Cartel ship job.

Lazlow. Playing himself as host of Chatterbox FM, the talk station that became a GTA fixture.

The payphone contacts are easy to miss. El Burro in Hepburn Heights, Marty Chonks at the Bitch’n’ Dog Food factory, King Courtney in Aspatria and D-Ice in Wichita Gardens each run short mission strings you will need for 100 percent completion.

What it changed for the series

The two top-down games and GTA 2 already had the formula: steal cars, take jobs, raise a wanted level. GTA III was the first to prove that formula worked in a 3D city you could walk through at street level. The list of firsts is long.

Fully 3D open world on RenderWare. The engine Criterion licensed to DMA ran Liberty City with no loading between districts, only at the island bridges. That seamlessness is what sold the fantasy.

Radio stations with DJs and talk. Nine stations, each with presenters, adverts and in some cases a real licensed back catalogue. Flashback 95.6 plays the Scarface soundtrack. Chatterbox FM is thirty minutes of Lazlow fielding calls. The PC and Xbox versions let you drop your own MP3s into a custom station.

The wanted system as you know it. Six stars, escalating from patrol cars to SWAT to the FBI to the army. Pay ‘n’ Spray garages to clear heat. Police bribes scattered around the map.

Mission structure. Walk into a marker, watch a cutscene, do the job, get paid. Side activities on the taxi, ambulance, fire truck and police car. A pager for mission messages. Garages that save your cars.

Cheat codes as button strings. Entering combinations during play became a ritual that carried through to “gta 5 cheat codes” and beyond. On PC you typed words like “gunsgunsguns” for weapons and “giveusatank” for a Rhino. Console players entered pad sequences. The San Andreas tank cheat that fans still look up today traces straight back to this game, and if you want the inputs for that one, see our “gta sa rhino cheat” guide.

Satirical worldbuilding. Fake brands, fake adverts, fake radio hosts, a city that mocks the real one. The mission “Two-Faced Tanner” exists purely to mock the Driver series. This tone is the GTA house style now.

It also cemented a lot of limits that later games removed. No motorcycles, no swimming, no climbing, no interiors beyond a handful of shops and the Leone mansion. Vice City fixed the bikes and Rockstar left the rest for San Andreas.

The release itself was shaped by September 11, 2001. The game was due on October 2 and slipped three weeks. Rockstar altered the police car livery, which had resembled the NYPD’s, and trimmed a few lines of dialogue. Rumours about cut missions involving planes and skyscrapers circulate to this day. Most of them are DEBUNKED: the Dodo was always designed to be hard to fly, and the content that was actually cut, such as the character Darkel, was removed well before the attacks.

Versions and re-releases

GTA III has been ported more times than most people realise. The versions fall into two families: the original RenderWare game and the 2021 Definitive Edition.

Original versions

Platform	Release	Notes
PlayStation 2	October 2001	The baseline. Lower resolution, 30 fps, heavy draw-in. Japan got a Capcom-published PS2 version in 2003.
PC	May 2002	Higher resolutions, mouse aiming, custom MP3 radio station. Still the base for the modding scene.
Xbox	2003	Part of the Grand Theft Auto Double Pack with Vice City. Better car models, reflections, custom soundtrack support.
Mac	November 2010	A TransGaming port of the PC version.
iOS and Android	December 2011	The 10 Year Anniversary Edition. Touch controls, controller support, cloud saves.
PS3 and PS4	2012 and 2015	PS2 Classic emulation. The PS4 release added trophies and upscaled rendering.

The Australian release was cut to remove the ability to pick up sex workers, after the game was initially refused classification. The uncut version arrived in Australia years later.

Definitive Edition

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition bundles GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas. It launched on November 11, 2021 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S, Switch and PC through the Rockstar Games Launcher. Grove Street Games rebuilt all three in Unreal Engine 4 with new lighting, higher-resolution textures, GTA V-style weapon and radio wheels, mission checkpoints and a proper pause map.

The launch was a mess. Rain effects obscured the screen, character models looked wrong, some songs were missing and the PC build was pulled for days. Rockstar issued a public apology on November 19, 2021 and promised patches. Those patches arrived through 2022. A larger update in November 2024, credited to Video Games Deluxe, added a classic lighting mode on consoles and PC that brings back the original fog and colour grading. Mobile versions of the Definitive Edition arrived on iOS and Android in December 2023, including through Netflix Games, and the PC version reached Steam and the Epic Games Store in early 2024.

Which version to play

Our call, in order:

1. Definitive Edition with classic lighting enabled. After the 2024 update it is the most playable version on modern hardware. Checkpoints alone save you hours on missions like “Espresso-2-Go!” and “The Exchange”.
2. Original PC version with community fixes. The purest experience if you have the Rockstar Store release. Widescreen and controller fixes are available from the mod community.
3. Xbox original on a backwards-compatible console. Only if you already own the Double Pack disc.
4. PS2 original. For purists with CRT setups. Everyone else will struggle with the draw distance.

Where to play it today

As of October 2026 the Definitive Edition is the only version Rockstar sells new. It is available on PS4 and PS5, Xbox One and Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC via the Rockstar Store, Steam and Epic, and on iOS and Android. Netflix subscribers can play the mobile version at no extra charge through the Netflix app. Rockstar has also rotated the Trilogy through the GTA+ subscription library on consoles, so check that catalogue before paying full price.

The original versions are harder to find. Rockstar delisted them from Steam and the mobile stores ahead of the Definitive Edition, then restored the PC classics to the Rockstar Store after the backlash. Anyone who bought the Definitive Edition on PC through Rockstar in the first months also received the originals free. PS2, Xbox and physical PS2 Classic discs remain second-hand only.

Store listings move, and Rockstar has delisted and relisted this game more than once. Treat the above as the lineup at the time of writing and confirm on your platform’s store.

Reception and legacy

Critics treated GTA III as a landmark from the first week. The PS2 version sits at 97 on Metacritic, which still places it among the highest-rated games on the platform. It won Game of the Year honours from multiple outlets at the end of 2001 and was the best-selling game of that year in the United States. Take-Two reported that the game had passed roughly 14 million copies sold by 2008, long before the mobile and Definitive Edition re-releases added more.

The controversy was equally loud. Politicians and parents’ groups in the US and UK attacked the game for letting players kill civilians and sex workers. The debate followed every GTA release afterwards and peaked with San Andreas’s Hot Coffee scandal in 2005.

Within the series, Liberty City became Rockstar’s default home. Liberty City Stories reused this exact map as a 1998 prequel on PSP in 2005. GTA IV rebuilt the city from scratch in 2008 with Broker, Algonquin and Alderney replacing the three islands here. Characters from GTA III resurface across the 3D-era games: Salvatore and Catalina in San Andreas, Toni and Donald Love in Liberty City Stories.

The broader influence is harder to measure because it is everywhere. The open-world crime game as a genre, from Saints Row to Sleeping Dogs to Watch Dogs, starts here. So does the idea that a game can sell itself on the freedom to ignore its own missions. When Rockstar publishes the “release date for gta 6” and the hype machine spins up, the thing being promised is still the thing this game first delivered in 2001: a city that reacts to you.

Its flaws are real. The story is thin, the final act is cruel, and the controls feel stiff next to anything made this century. It is still worth finishing, if only to understand why everything that came after looks the way it does.

FAQ

How long does GTA III take to finish?

The main story runs about 15 to 20 hours for a first playthrough. Reaching 100 percent completion, including all hidden packages, rampages, stunt jumps and side missions, takes 30 to 40 hours. The Definitive Edition’s checkpoints cut the story time noticeably.

Does Claude ever speak?

No. He has no voiced lines in GTA III and remains silent during his cameo in GTA San Andreas. His name appears in-game only in San Andreas and in later credits.

Is Liberty City in GTA III the same as in GTA IV?

No. GTA IV’s Liberty City is a complete rebuild with different borough names and layout. The GTA III map was reused only in Liberty City Stories and in GTA Advance on the Game Boy Advance.

Can you fly the Dodo?

Yes, with practice. The plane’s wings are clipped so it fights you constantly. The trick is to hold the nose down on the runway until you hit speed, then feather the pitch. Sustained flight across the city is a well-known skill run and nothing more.

Which version is best for a first playthrough?

The Definitive Edition with classic lighting switched on. It keeps the original tone, adds a map and checkpoints, and runs on every current platform.

Why was the game delayed in 2001?

The September 11 attacks pushed the release from October 2 to October 22. Rockstar changed the police car colours and adjusted some dialogue. Claims that entire missions were cut are mostly unfounded.