quasi-believable (at least in an action movie sense), yet keeps the driving fun and fairly
forgiving. Similarly, though the cars are able to sustain much more damage than is real-
istic, if you treat a car badly enough, it will eventually explode, hopefully without you
inside it.
Within the city, the game also presents a very believable traffic simulation, with
cars waiting for traffic lights, staying on the right side of the road, honking at each other,
and some cars weaving in and out between others. Similarly, the pedestrian simulation
seems just as authentic, with citizens going about their own lives in the city instead of
appearing to have been placed there strictly for the players’ benefit. In sharp contrast to
most games,GTA3creates the sense that this world does not revolve around the player
at all; the player character is just one guy in a city full of shady characters. At the same
time, both the traffic and pedestrian simulation will react to the players’ actions in a
believable way. If players run up and punch one of these random civilians, he will fight
back while the other citizens flee in terror. Any police who happen be around will run up
to try to stop the fight. If players stop their car in the middle of street, traffic will stop
and the drivers will honk. All of this contributes to the feeling of a believable world.
Though the game-world is far from “real,” the world is recognizable and these various
systems create a consistent space in which players will enjoy playing. In a way sadly
few games do,Grand Theft Auto IIIfosters the spirit of play in players, encouraging
them to try out that crazy jump, see if they can find some way inside that fence to a tan-
talizing power-up, or daring them to try to outrun an entire SWAT team. David Jones,
Creative Director at DMA Design when the first twoGrand Theft Autogames were
developed, has stated that the first goal of the games was to build a believable city envi-
ronment in which gamers could have fun just playing around. Turning the game into a
crime and car-jacking game came later, after the city simulation was already enjoyable
by itself.
DespiteGrand Theft Auto III’s impressive world simulation, it is equally interest-
ing what the game-world does not attempt to do. The pedestrians and traffic on the
street are intelligent enough to support the illusion of reality, but at the same time are
not exactly brilliant. For instance, the pedestrians sometimes appear to be walking
around the world like zombies and can easily get hung up on a car left parked in the mid-
dle of a sidewalk. Furthermore, these civilians do not make much of an effort to get out
of the way of a car heading straight for them. A more advanced simulation of these
pedestrians could probably have fixed these problems, but might have made them more
computationally expensive and meant fewer of these NPCs could be walking down the
street at any one time. Clearly the designers came to the conclusion that having enough
NPCs to make the world look truly alive was more important than making each one of
them super smart. So too with the art: if one looks at the graphics, no one piece of it is
particularly breathtaking. But taken together, the graphics become impressive because
of the sheer size of the city and the amount of variety contained in it. In order to make
the world so large and to allow players to see so far at any one time, the game’s art is all
fairly low polygon. Indeed, the developers seem to have embraced a cartoonish art
style more compatible with their limited graphical horsepower, probably because they
understood their limitations at the start of development and decided to embrace these
restrictions instead of fighting them. But players forgive the somewhat low-rent
appearance of the game because of its incredible depth as a gameplay experience. In
478 Chapter 24: Game Analysis:Grand Theft Auto III