Grand Theft Auto III producer Leslie Benzies
Development
The core development team of Grand Theft Auto III consisted of about 23 people at DMA Design in Edinburgh, who worked closely with publisher Rockstar Games in New York City. The original prototype for the game was created on the Dreamcast around the end of development on the previous game Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999), which led to it being greenlit. By early 2001, the team had designed the city, cars and some weapons. An online multiplayer mode was initially planned for the game, but was ultimately dropped due to time and resource limitations. Producer Leslie Benzies described Grand Theft Auto III as a "crime simulation game". Rockstar originally offered it to Microsoft Game Studios as an Xbox exclusive, but Microsoft declined due to the game's adult nature and its poorly-performing predecessors. The game was released for the PlayStation 2 on 23 October 2001 in North America. When porting the game to Windows, the team delayed it from the PlayStation 2 release in order to ensure quality, citing issues with the simultaneous platform release of previous games in the series. Capcom published the game in Japan in September 2003.
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