"But there is never any way to know how others will feel. "We were making the game we had always wanted to play we took the earlier GTA's as a guide, but we just ran with things, excited by the possibilities and iterating organically as we played and felt things evolve," says Garbut. Those things were there too, but at its heart it was freedom that felt exhilarating." If I can make it here "It felt new – there was a level of immersion in the world that felt like it happened around you rather than for you, like you could just have fun in, without following a path defined by missions or story.
"I remember knowing it was something we thought was cool – I remember enjoying just messing about in our world and interacting with the ambient world and the cops," says Aaron Garbut, the head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North who's worked on every Grand Theft Auto since the series' inception. GTA 3, though, was the game that pistol whipped them back to their screens on account of its variety, scale and possibility – that this world was real, ripe for exploring and manipulatable to their every whim. At 15 years old, at a time when gaming was still viewed by many as niche, my core circle of friends had begun turning their heads away from consoles and control pads, and towards teenage indulgence. It's been 20 years since that exchange, and 20 years since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed the landscape of open world video games.