By dragging the series from a top-down 2D view into a fully realised 3D city, GTA III didn't just transform Grand Theft Auto — it invented the modern open-world game and set a template the industry still follows.
Follows: Grand Theft Auto 2
The leap from top-down 2D to street-level 3D was the whole game. Grand Theft Auto's first two entries let players look down on Liberty City like a map; GTA III put them inside it, and as art director Aaron Garbut framed it, the player was suddenly in the world rather than above it. That single change made the city a place rather than a diagram — a continuous space to be driven and walked without loading screens, populated by stealable vehicles, reactive pedestrians, escalating police, and radio stations that gave the streets a soundtrack and a personality. The freedom felt genuinely unprecedented, and it turned a well-liked crime series into a phenomenon.
GTA III became the best-selling game of 2001 and the second-best of 2002, and the political uproar over its content only widened its reach. But its lasting importance is architectural: it fused a story-driven mission structure with total freedom to ignore that story, inside a coherent 3D city, and in doing so it defined the open-world genre. The template — seamless traversal, emergent chaos, player-paced narrative — became the default blueprint for an entire category of blockbuster game, followed by Rockstar's own sequels and countless imitators. Few sequels have redefined not just their own series but the shape of the medium; GTA III did both.