Grand Theft Auto is a gaming juggernaut today, with the fifth game in the series still selling over a decade after it originally launched and the upcoming sixth game effectively deciding the fate of the video game industry as a whole.
Amid this amazing commercial success, it's easy to forget that at one point, the GTA franchise wasn't the sure-fire hit it is today. The first game was praised and sold well, while the second didn't quite reach the same heights. When Rockstar started work on the third mainline entry, there was no guarantee that it would find an audience.
That has been reiterated by Rockstar co-founder and former GTA boss Dan Houser, who has been speaking on British TV about the breakout success of GTA 3 (thanks, Games Radar).
Houser – who departed Rockstar in 2020 after overseeing GTA 3, 4, and 5 – explains on the show Sunday Brunch that there was a degree of uncertainty about how the groundbreaking third outing would be received prior to its launch in 2001:
"I think all of the team felt with GTA 3 – which was the big breakthrough one in 2001, and we were very much running out of money at the time as a company – I think all the team thought, 'this could be amazing. There's something really magical about this.'"
The game eventually came together, with Houser even going so far as to say that it felt like "the future, in a way."
Even so, he admits that, outside of Rockstar's offices, hype was hard to come by – a sharp contrast to what happens when a GTA game is in development today.
"Until it came out, no one outside of our company was very excited by it," he explains. "So that came out just after 9/11 in late 2001, and as it came out, people suddenly got more excited about it."
GTA 3 would become the best-selling game of 2001, and eventually shifted 14.5 million copies across all formats. Its successors would become even more successful; total series sales stand at around 450 million units.