GTA III (2001): The Ten Days That Changed Take-Two

Most histories of Grand Theft Auto III describe what it did to games. This page looks at something narrower and easier to check: what it did to the company that published it. Take-Two's fiscal year ended on October 31. GTA III reached stores on October 22, 2001, with ten days of that year left, and it still turned up as the company's single biggest title in the annual report. A year later it was nearly a third of everything Take-Two sold. Those filings, together with the launch reviews, are the record this article is built on.

At a glance

What is counted, and how

Every sales number here is a company statement, quoted with the date it was made. Take-Two never broke GTA III out on its own in a single lifetime figure that we could find after 2004, so the table below stops there rather than guessing. The units are what Take-Two and Rockstar called "sold" or "shipped"; those are publisher figures, not retail tracking.

The revenue shares come from Take-Two's annual 10-K reports, which list the percentage of net sales each top title contributed. We use the three-year table in the fiscal 2003 10-K because it puts all three years side by side. The earlier reports give slightly different figures for the same years (7.4% for fiscal 2001 and 30.0% for fiscal 2002, against 7.3% and 29.8% in the later table). Both versions are cited.

The day count is simple: from Oct 22 to Oct 31, 2001, counting both days, is 10 days.

Left out: the often-repeated claim that GTA III sold a specific number in its first weeks, and later lifetime totals, because we could not open a primary source for them. Also left out for now: the story of GTA III's delay after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the content changes attributed to it. We have not yet confirmed it against a primary source we can cite, so it waits for a later update.

The setup

The player starts as an unnamed criminal who is double-crossed by his girlfriend during a bank robbery, shot and left for dead, as IGN's launch review put it. The game never gives him a name. Rockstar's later material names him: the company's 2011 anniversary release calls him the game's "lead character, Claude."

Liberty City is split into three large areas, which IGN described as industrial, commercial and suburban districts, "each with appropriate architecture, landscapes, and aggressive, distinctive AI."

What it changed

Rockstar's own summary, in the 2011 anniversary release, is that GTA III was "the first three-dimensional, open-world Grand Theft Auto title." Sam Houser, Rockstar's founder, said in that release that the game "showed us the potential of open world games."

IGN's launch review is more specific about what that meant next to GTA 2 and the original game, which Doug Perry noted had been on PC and PlayStation:

The radio point matters for later games; our radio stations page follows that thread.

The ten days, in Take-Two's books

This is the table no other page on this site has: GTA III's share of Take-Two's whole business, year by year, from the company's own 10-K.

Read across the rows and the pattern is plain. A game that was on sale for under two weeks of fiscal 2001 was still large enough to be named as a principal product. In fiscal 2002, combining the PS2 and PC lines from the later table gives 29.8 + 3.1 = 32.9% of net sales from one game.

The unit figures grew in step:

Reception

IGN's headline verdict called it "Rockstar's greatest achievement." Rockstar's 2011 anniversary release quoted GameSpot calling it "easily one of the greatest games of all time" and called it the highest-rated PlayStation 2 game on Metacritic, at 97.

Legacy

GTA III set the template that Vice City and San Andreas refined in the following three years. Liberty City came back in Liberty City Stories on PSP in October 2005 and in GTA IV in April 2008.

On Oct 22, 2021, 20 years to the day after GTA III's release, Rockstar announced Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, a remastered set of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas adapted by Grove Street Games in Unreal Engine. It launched digitally on Nov 11, 2021. Its launch went badly enough that Rockstar posted an apology, saying the updated games "did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality," and said it would put the classic PC versions back on the Rockstar Store.

Trivia

• Rockstar's Oct 13, 2011 anniversary release names the hero as Claude and announced a 1:6 scale Claude action figure, dressed in cargo pants and a bomber jacket and supplied with a Liberty City prison jumpsuit.
• Take-Two's fiscal 2001 annual report says the company stopped selling GTA III in Australia "for several weeks" while it made content changes to comply with the local rating system.
• GTA III reached Japan about two years late, on PS2 and PC, through a license with Capcom. Take-Two said it sold about 300,000 copies there by the week ending Dec 7, 2003, citing Famitsu's parent company Enterbrain.
• GTA III first reached the Xbox as half of the Grand Theft Auto Double Pack with Vice City, scheduled for Nov 4, 2003 in North America, with Europe planned for Jan 2, 2004.

Sources

• Take-Two 10-K, fiscal 2001
• Take-Two 10-K, fiscal 2002
• Take-Two 10-K, fiscal 2003
• Take-Two Q3 fiscal 2003 results, Sep 3 2003
• Take-Two Q4 fiscal 2003 results, Dec 18 2003
• Rockstar Games Announces Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Mar 1 2004
• Rockstar Games Ships Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Oct 25 2004
• Rockstar Games Announces 10th Anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III, Oct 13 2011
• Rockstar Games on PlayStation Blog, The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition coming November 11, Oct 22 2021
• Gematsu, Rockstar Games apologizes for The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition technical issues, Nov 19 2021
• IGN, Doug Perry, Grand Theft Auto III Review, Oct 22 2001, checked on the Wayback snapshot
• IGN, Grand Theft Auto III PC Review, May 27 2002, checked on the Wayback snapshots of page 1 and page 3
• IGN, Grand Theft Auto Double Pack Review, Oct 22 2003, checked on the Wayback snapshot
• Metacritic, Grand Theft Auto III
• Rockstar Games Announces Grand Theft Auto IV Now Available Worldwide, Apr 29 2008
• Take-Two 10-K, fiscal 2005