GTA 3 Art Director: Releasing the Game Was 'Cathartic'

Ever wonder what it felt like to ship a game that would change the industry forever? For Rockstar's Aaron Garbut, releasing Grand Theft Auto 3 was equal parts terrifying and cathartic.

In a retrospective interview, Garbut—now co-studio head and art director at Rockstar North—recalled the wild journey from DMA Design's early days to the 3D revolution. The team had just opened an Edinburgh office after a decade in Dundee, and the industry was shifting to 3D. The young crew behind Body Harvest believed they could take GTA into that third dimension. But the studio's old guard wasn't so sure. "We had a bit of pushback from them," Garbut says.

So the team built a tech demo on the Dreamcast—a simple city with cars and pedestrians. Within weeks, you could steal a car and drive around. They showed it to Sam Houser, the executive producer at Take-Two's new label, Rockstar Games. Houser had backed GTA from the start and was eager for the series to evolve. "Sam has always been the voice of the player," Garbut says. "He has always encouraged us to go further, to take risks."

The demo galvanized the team. "We knew what we were doing in 3D and were young, arrogant, and naïve enough to feel like it was easy and exciting," Garbut laughs. They focused on building a living, breathing city—a playset for players to wreak havoc in. They kept the core premise of playing an antihero criminal working for worse criminals, along with Wanted levels and Pay And Spray shops. But they ditched the arcade-like "pinball scoring" for destruction. "We didn't really approach it like a sequel," Garbut says. "We worked in broad strokes."

One of the biggest challenges was the density of the world. "We didn't have any contemporaries working with densely populated urban environments," Garbut points out. Unlike driving games built for speed or Zelda's spread-out design, GTA 3 aimed to offer everything in one seamless experience. "We didn't split things into nice manageable, loadable chunks," he says. "We were trying to offer it all in one experience, and to make it feel as alive as possible."

The art team broke the world apart by hand to fit it into memory, while the code team built an elegant streaming system. They even wrote files to the DVD in specific orders to keep areas together physically on the disk. "It's a testament to the talent and ingenuity of the team that we made this work," Garbut says.

Looking back, Garbut admits the pressure was immense. "It's terrifying, and releasing GTA 3 was cathartic," he reflects. "We were a young team, relatively inexperienced. There's a lot to carry before a game comes out; experience helps with that." But that inexperience also fueled their boldness—and gave us one of the most influential games ever made.

What do you think? Would you have bet on that scrappy Dreamcast demo? Let us know in the comments!