GTA 3 originally planned for police to chase players for running red lights. However, the law enforcers were too persistent and aggressive
The police in GTA 3 could have been as meticulous as in the first Mafia and punished us even for minor offenses. However, the developers rejected this idea because it could have scared off fans of the series.
Games have always balanced between fiction and realism, so even if they imitate the real world, they usually do it in a conventional way. A perfect example is the Grand Theft Auto series, in which the police approach our offenses with great leniency. However, it turns out that in GTA 3, officers could be much more scrupulous - even minor traffic offenses were supposed to attract their attention.
Police in GTA 3 could punish for crossing red lights
Obbe Vermeij, a former Rockstar Games employee, revealed that he originally planned for running a red light to result in the awarding of the first star, indicating a police pursuit. However, this was not met with a positive reception from the team, especially since at this stage the officers were becoming quite aggressive. This could, in turn, discourage fans.
The designer admitted that this system was more fitting for the 2002 game Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, where you could also receive a ticket for speeding, driving against traffic, or having a fender bender. Even though this function ultimately didn't make it into GTA 3, it remained in the title's code just in case the developers changed their minds.
Street traffic and traffic light signals in GTA 3
Vermeij also revealed some details about the traffic light system, which in the third and fourth installments of the GTA series switches between three states: North/South and East/West, to finally allow pedestrians to use the crosswalks. The cycle is determined based on the orientation of a given place and is assigned to individual road nodes. This means that even if we destroy the traffic light, other drivers will continue to follow it. The dev also added that the intensity of traffic and even the presence of specific vehicles depend on the time of day (this is easy to notice in the game, when completing the lists of wanted cars, for instance, garbage trucks mainly roam the city in the early morning hours).
This is another case where Obbe Vermeij shares interesting facts from his time working at Rockstar Games studio. Last year, he revealed, among other things, the behind-the-scenes of the creation of codes present in the GTA series.
Grand Theft Auto 3 was released in 2001 on PlayStation 2, and later also made its way to PC, the first Xbox, PlayStation 4 (exclusively in digital distribution), and mobile devices. Since 2021, the game has been available as the compilation Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, alongside GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas.
