Grand Theft Auto 3 is the spookiest GTA. There's something oddly eerie and unsettling about Rockstar's 2001 vision of Liberty City that is hard to fully describe. It's the overcast skies and empty streets at night. The newspapers and fallen autumn leaves blowing around in the wind like tumbleweeds in a Western. The heavy fog that rolls in when it rains, draping the city in a thick blanket of gloom. The green-tinged colour grading and woozy motion blur. Compared to vibrant, sunshine-soaked sequels like Vice City and Grand Theft Auto 5, there's a dreary, grim feeling to GTA 3 that gives it a distinctively surreal atmosphere.
This downbeat tone is established the moment you load up the game, in a stylish, Saul Bass-esque opening sequence. A melancholy jazz theme, all moody piano and muted trumpets, plays over shots of the city. I still think this is the best of the series' many great main themes. GTA 3 is of course full of the usual Rockstar silliness, with wild characters, fart jokes, and tongue-in-cheek satire. But this sits alongside a game that also has the harsh, bleak feel of a neo-noir crime film. There's something cold and nihilistic about the tone, reminiscent of cult '70s American cinema, which has always stuck with me more than the daft, funny bits.
Even though the map is tiny by modern standards, GTA 3 manages to create a powerful sense of loneliness. This is partly down to the cruel, unpleasant nature of Liberty City itself—a decaying, crime-ridden urban sprawl where everyone hates each other and no one cares if you live or die. Later GTAs would attempt to humanise their characters on some level, but there's barely a trace of warmth or humanity in this ruthless place. But another, less overt contributor to the lonely ambience is the way certain corners of the world—docks, junkyards, beaches—are emptied of pedestrians, especially when night falls, which gives it a desolate, isolated feel.
It isn't much better when there are people around. The chatty, low-poly pedestrians who wander the streets are almost all weird, unfriendly, or violent. Liberty City seems to be populated entirely by hostile, aggressive, eccentric people. Everywhere you look there are armed gangsters looking for trouble, including shotgun-wielding Mafia goons and Triads toting baseball bats. Fights will occasionally break out, leaving lifeless bodies leaking blood on the sidewalk. It's a dark, oppressive city, even in the busiest, most populated areas of commercial district Staunton Island. There's something in the air that just feels dangerous.
GTA 3 was released at the turn of the millennium, when Hollywood had its own bleak period. People were embracing the grimy, dark, and nihilistic—flocking to see movies like Fight Club, American Psycho, Memento, Ronin, Pi, and Seven. There was optimism about the dawn of the year 2000, but just as much pessimism, distrust, and fear—a mood GTA 3 captures. It's as much a time capsule for the early 2000s as any film, novel, or album from the period, which has turned it into something of an artifact. The fact some parts of the game were changed in the wake of 9/11 also adds a further undercurrent of dark historical weight to it.
The weather effects in GTA 3 are a big part of what makes it so powerfully atmospheric. Later Rockstar open world games would go on to feature volumetric clouds, various types of rain, and dynamic, realistic weather systems. But there's still something striking about the rainstorms in Liberty City, despite their relative simplicity. The way all the colour is drained from the streets. The dense, pounding rain that seems to flood the screen. That impossibly grey, gloomy sky looming over you. Whenever it rains in GTA 3, its dark, moody vibes are amplified massively. 20 years later, I still think it's among the best video game rain.
Interestingly, GTA 3's creepy, idiosyncratic atmosphere has only been heightened by the passage of time. Primitive 3D graphics have recently become a kind of shorthand for horror, with indie devs aping the limitations of late '90s and early 2000s visuals to add a layer of lo-fi texture and haunting nostalgia to their games. GTA 3 has not aged well from a technical perspective, but the crude visuals and hazy lighting only add to its strange, uncanny ambience. The wistful, nostalgic element is extra strong if you played the game when it was first released, as you inevitably start thinking about where you were, and who you were, at the time. It's amazing how evocative and atmospheric one small virtual city can be.