If you weren’t there at the time, it’s really difficult to put into words just how impressive GTA 3 was on the PS2.
Sure, there’d been open world games before – Shenmue pre-dated it by a couple of years in Japan – but nothing on the scale of Liberty City, a living breathing sandbox where you could do anything and go anywhere.
But how the heck did Rockstar squeeze the world into the PS2’s 32MB RAM? This video digs into the dev’s wizardry.
While many of you may already be familiar with the concepts explained by the Game Maker’s Tool Kit here, we thought it was worth sharing just because of how brilliantly assembled it is.
Mark Brown does an excellent job taking quite complicated ideas and demonstrating them in a way that’s really easy to digest.
We’ll let him do the explaining, but effectively the dev divided Liberty City into a series of squares, pulling in the assets required once you get close to them. This allows it to constantly repopulate the RAM with whatever information it needs, flushing the information once you get further away.
The video delves into all kinds of common headaches, like pop-in and texture streaming. It also explains how Rockstar overcame the comparatively slow read speed of the PS2’s DVD drive.
A lot of these techniques are still used today, of course, albeit in much more complicated fashion. But this video will not only help you understand how open world games work, but also the kind of magic the developer was able to achieve on the PS2.
In the end, GTA 3 and its superior successors Vice City and San Andreas would go on to become two of the best-selling PS2 games of all time.
And Rockstar’s continued to push the envelope ever since, most recently with Red Dead Redemption 2 – and presumably with the upcoming GTA 6 as well.
